Projects
Forging Solidarity
"Forging Solidarity" is a project that analyzes how politicians, political parties, and interest groups explain the purpose of social policies and political engagement "in the interest of others." We try to understand how political explanations, alongside other determinants, shape opinions about solidarity, the institutions that organize it, and the policies that demand it, as well as the forms of collective action that advance it. In short, we want to understand whether how solidarity can be forged.
Our empirical focus is on political debates about the provision of health care, the protection of workers, pensions, and social investment through education. We develop the tool of automated explanation analysis to identify the political explanations that different actors use in large bodies of texts. We conduct laboratory experiments and representative survey experiments that manipulate the explanations of different political actors for various social policies and forms of collective action, using the information gathered by text analysis.