
Richard TraunmüllerUniversity of Mannheim · Department of Political Science
Richard Traunmüller
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Publications (66)
The RISS Internalization Survey aims to link multidimensional social structural positioning to individual attitudes and perceptions. It encompasses modules on socio-structural positions, social identification, and key attitudinal and behavioral indicators of social cohesion and political conflict. It features new and experimental measurement instru...
Wie steht es um die Freiheit der Lehre und Forschung in Deutschland? Der vorliegendeKurzreport gibt einen ersten Überblick über die Ergebnisse einer aktuellen Studie zudiesem viel diskutierten Thema. Es handelt sich um die erste repräsentative Studiezum Stand der akademischen Redefreiheit an deutschen Hochschulen. Befragt wurdenHochschulbeschäftigt...
Immigration policy is often considered one of the most divisive issues in Western Europe and North America. We explore whether that debate has been oversimplified. We start from the position that immigration is a complex issue comprising many specific policy choices. We then investigate whether preferences are consistently open or closed across a r...
The German Social Cohesion Panel (SCP) is a probability-based self-administered longitudinal study in a mixed-mode design (PAPI and CAWI) that is jointly carried out by the Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The aim of the study is to capture the diversity of social cohesion in Germany from multipl...
A common understanding emphasizes the destructive effects of conflict‐related sexual violence (CRSV) on social cohesion and community life. Stressing the agency of survivors, we present an alternative argument. Our theory predicts that survivors seek to counteract the stigma attached to CRSV by contributing to the community in the form of civic eng...
This is a study on the inclusion of Muslims in liberal democracies in the presence of value conflict. We focus on handshaking controversies that appear to pit gender equality against religious freedom. The possible outcomes seem mutually exclusive: either conservative Muslim minorities must conform to the norms of the majority culture, or non-Musli...
This chapter concludes the special issue on social integration and makes three additional contributions. First, we discuss how the featured articles employ the concept of social integration that we have proposed in the introduction. We find clear references to the four ingredients of social integration that we have suggested: consensus, trust, conf...
Gibt es in Deutschland eine Entkopplung sozialer Gruppen? Und welche Rolle für den gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt spielen soziale Netzwerke - hier verstanden als der Bekanntenkreis einer Person? Diesen Fragen gehen wir in diesem Zusammenhaltsbericht nach. Unsere Analysen basieren auf repräsentativen Forschungsdaten des German Social Cohesion Panel...
Sexual violence is a prevalent feature of war with severe physical, psychological, and social consequences for survivors. Yet we have a limited understanding of how survivors relate to their political environment after the conflict ends. We analyze individual-level survey data on postwar Sri Lanka to assess whether wartime sexual victimization rela...
Is the social integration of contemporary Western societies at risk? We will not provide an answer to this question, which is high on the political agenda. Instead, in our introduction to this special issue, we first offer conceptual clarifications. What is a theoretically sound and empirically useful understanding of the social integration of mode...
Immigration is an extremely divisive political issue in Western Europe and North America. We examine whether immigration policy preferences are more nuanced than commonly understood. Too often, analyses of immigration policy preferences only consider the number of people allowed into the country. Yet, immigration policy must also address which peop...
In democracy and in science, we need open discourse with dissenters. Surveys show, however, that a part of the population no longer feels free to express its political opinion. Some even speak of a dictatorship of opinion. But a disturbed culture of discussion is not a dictatorship. The discussants create their own communication problems. Maria-Sib...
Ist Islamophobie ein anderer Begriff für Fremdenfeindlichkeit? Geht es um die Angst vor einer anderen Religion? Oder vielmehr um eine Ablehnung des Religiösen? Diese Fragen werden in fünf westeuropäischen Ländern untersucht. Dabei zeigt sich, dass die Ablehnung besonders dann hoch ist, wenn es sich um fundamentalistische Migrant*innen handelt. Wenn...
Ist Islamophobie ein anderer Begriff für Fremdenfeindlichkeit? Geht es um die Angst vor einer anderen Religion? Oder vielmehr um eine Ablehnung des Religiösen? Diese Fragen werden in fünf westeuropäischen Ländern untersucht. Dabei zeigt sich, dass die Ablehnung besonders dann hoch ist, wenn es sich um fundamentalistische Migrant*innen handelt. Wenn...
Voters’ beliefs about the strength of political parties are a central part of many foundational political science theories. In this article, we present a dynamic Bayesian learning model that allows us to study how voters form these beliefs by learning from pre-election polls over the course of an election campaign. In the model, belief adaptation t...
The GLES Open Science Challenge 2021 was a pilot project aimed at demonstrating that registered reports are an appropriate and beneficial publication format in quantitative political science that helps to increase transparency and replicability in the research process and thus yields substantial and relevant contributions to our discipline. The pro...
Der vorliegende Bericht stellt zentrale Ergebnisse einer Pilotstudie zur Analyse des gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalts in Deutschland vor, die bereits in der Gründungsphase des „Forschungsinstitut Gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt“ (FGZ) durchgeführt wurde. Mit der FGZ-Pilotstudie 2020 sollte die im September 2021 angelaufene Längsschnittstudie „Zusam...
Immigrant non-citizens are often considered less deserving than citizens of welfare and other public services. The logic is that valuable and scarce public resources must be limited somehow, and the club of citizens is one way of drawing a boundary. In this paper, we examine how far that boundary extends, by analyzing the extent to which Germans pr...
We provide the first systematic research into the origins of subjective freedom of speech in Germany. Relying on the GLES 2021 Cross-Section Pre-Election Survey, which includes a newly designed survey item on subjective freedom of speech, we evaluate a whole range of plausible candidate hypotheses. First, we contribute to cumulative research by tes...
Recent scholarship on affective polarization documents partisan animosity in people's everyday lives. But does partisan dislike go so far as to deny fundamental rights? We study this question through a moral dilemma that gained notoriety during the COVID-19 pandemic: triage decisions on the allocation of intensive medical care. Using a conjoint exp...
Several studies have shown that attitudes toward immigrants to Europe are marked by a Muslim bias. More recently, Helbling and Traunmüller (2020) have suggested that this Muslim bias is in fact driven by a religiosity bias and thus that the strength of migrant’ religiosity has a bigger effect on attitudes towards them than their nominal faith. The...
Wartime sexual violence is widespread across conflict zones and thought to leave a disastrous legacy for survivors, communities, and nations. Yet, systematic studies on i) the prevalence and ii) the social and political consequences of wartime sexual violence are fraught with severe data limitations. Based on individual-level survey evidence from t...
In the last decade, a growing divide has opened up at universities in terms of how academic freedom is valued and defined. On the one hand, there are those for whom academic freedom is a fundamental individual right that is generally worth protecting. On the other hand, there are those who place ideological restrictions on the protection of researc...
This short report describes the development of a COVID-19 module for Round 10 of the European Social Survey (ESS). The module is formed of 20 items, including 10 agreed with ESS National Coordinators and 10 developed by two academic teams following an external call for content. The majority of ESS participating countries will field the module for R...
Es geht ein Gespenst um in den Feuilletons: Durch zunehmende "Cancel Culture" sich verengende Debatten- und Meinungskorridore, mögliche "Schweigespiralen" (Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, 1980), durch die Forderung nach "Safe Spaces" (sicheren Orten) seien das kritische Denken und die Universität in Gefahr. Dagegen wettern andere, dieser Alarmismus sei l...
Recent scholarship on affective polarization documents partisan animosity that extends to people's everyday lives. But does partisan dislike go so far as to deny fundamental rights to political opponents? We study this question through a moral dilemma that gained worldwide notoriety during the COVID-19 pandemic: triage decisions on the allocation o...
We invite you to participate in a collaborative research effort among scholars with conflicting viewpoints to jointly devise and conduct a quantitative survey on free speech on campus.A recent study (Revers & Traunmüller 2020) claims to have found evidence for widespread support for restricting free speech on campus, experiences of conformity press...
We invite you to participate in a collaborative research effort among scholars with conflicting viewpoints to jointly devise and conduct a quantitative survey on free speech on campus.A recent study (Revers & Traunmüller 2020) claims to have found evidence for widespread support for restricting free speech on campus, experiences of conformity press...
Zusammenfassung
In unserer Antwort gehen wir auf einige Kritikpunkte an unserer Studie „Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus?“ ein, die uns wiederholt und in ähnlicher Form in Diskussionen begegnen. Diese betreffen unsere Fallauswahl, unser Verständnis und unsere Operationalisierung von Toleranz und Meinungsfreiheit sowie nicht zuletzt uns...
Citizens’ beliefs about uncertain events are fundamental variables in many areas of political science. While beliefs are often conceptualized in the form of distributions, obtaining reliable measures in terms of full probability densities is a difficult task. In this letter, we ask if there is an effective way of eliciting beliefs as distributions...
Datenvisualisierung ist eine der effektivsten Methoden, um quantitative Information zu explorieren, zu beschreiben und zu kommunizieren. Dieser Beitrag diskutiert, welche Ziele Datenvisualisierung verfolgt und was sie zu einem analytischen Werkzeug macht. Zum einen wird Visualisierung für den wichtigen Schritt der Datenexploration beschrieben. Exem...
Focusing on one specific aspect of immigrant political integration—how authorities deal with their political right to demonstrate—we show in a large-scale survey experiment that liberal policy decisions permitting demonstrations lead to a polarization in attitudes: citizens who agree with a permission become more sympathetic, while those in favor o...
While universities play a key role in questions of free speech and political viewpoint diversity, they are often associated with the opposite of a free exchange of ideas: a proliferation of restrictive campus speech codes, violent protests against controversial speakers and even the firing of inconvenient professors. For some observers these trends...
Although universities play a key role in questions of free speech and political viewpoint diversity, they are often associated with the opposite of a free exchange of ideas: a proliferation of restrictive campus speech codes, violent protests against controversial speakers and even the firing of inconvenient professors. For some observers these tre...
While universities play a key role in questions of free speech and political viewpoint diversity, they are often associated with the opposite of a free exchange of ideas: a proliferation of restrictive campus speech codes, violent protests against controversial speakers, and even the firing of inconvenient professors. For some observers these trend...
Voters’ expectations of party strengths are a central part of many foundational political science theories that posit a strategic act by the voter. But how do voters develop these beliefs and how is this belief formation affected by polling reports? In this article, we present a dynamic Bayesian learning model that serves as a baseline for how beli...
Sexual violence is believed to be widespread during war. Yet empirical evidence concerning its prevalence is often limited. Victims, out of feelings of shame or fear, underreport this form of violence. We tackle this problem by administering a list experiment in a representative survey in Sri Lanka, which is only recently recovering from an ethnic...
This article evaluates the reliability of sensitivity tests. Using Monte Carlo methods we show that, first, the definition of robustness exerts a large influence on the robustness of variables. Second and more importantly, our results also demonstrate that inferences based on sensitivity tests are most likely to be valid if determinants and confoun...
What citizens think about Muslim immigrants has important implications for some of the most pressing challenges facing Western democracies. To advance contemporary understanding of what ‘Islamophobia’ really is – for example, whether it is a dislike based on immigrants’ ethnic background, religious identity or specific religious behaviors – this st...
Religious group size, demographic composition, and the dynamics thereof are of interest in many areas of social science including migration, social cohesion, parties and voting, and violent conflict. Existing estimates however are of varying and perhaps poor quality because many countries do not collect official data on religious identity. We propo...
Citizens’ beliefs about uncertain events are fundamental variables in many areas of political science. While beliefs are often conceptualized in the form of distributions, obtaining reliable measures in terms of full probability densities is a difficult task. In this letter we ask whether there is an effective way to elicit beliefs as distributions...
Einer der einflussreichsten Religionssoziologen der vergangenen Dekaden, Rodney Stark, fasste die Forschungsbefunde zur Religiosität von Frauen und Männern und zu Geschlechtsunterschieden in der Religiosität vor wenigen Jahren wie folgt zusammen: „The fact is that women were and are more religious than men in all known eras and religions and in all...
Die religionspolitischen Regime Europas befinden sich gegenwärtig unter erheblichem Anpassungsdruck. Vor dem Hintergrund eines wachsenden weltanschaulichen Pluralismus und der einwanderungsbedingten Präsenz religiöser Minderheiten sind politische Konflikte über Status und Rechte religiöser Gruppen, die öffentliche Zurschaustellung religiöser Symbol...
Religion and politics is the turf of normative theorists and historically or culturally orientated scholars who have little interest in generalizable and testable propositions about political reality. This contribution argues for an analytical political science approach that is based on clearly stated assumptions from which testable propositions ca...
This article investigates the moderating effect of social context on the relationship between religion and vote choice. Whereas theories of electoral research and the sociology of religion assume a linear contextual effect, we develop a new theoretical argument that predicts a non-linear effect. The results of logistic multilevel analyses confirm t...
Wenngleich Religion einen prominenten Platz in den Werken der Klassiker der Sozialkapitaltheorie einnimmt, so kann noch lange nicht von einer allgemeinen ‚Theorie‘ des Einflusses von Religion auf Sozialkapital gesprochen werden. Wie die Überlegungen der führenden Sozialkapitaltheoretiker selbst, so stellt sich auch der weitere Forschungsstand bisla...
In diesem Kapitel wird die empirische Analyse fortgesetzt und um erklärende Größen auf der Kontextebene der Länder ergänzt. In Einklang mit der Theoriediskussion in Kapitel 3.2 wird dabei der Einfluss von vier religiösen Kontextmerkmalen überprüft, namentlich der dominanten religiösen Kulturtradition, des gesellschaftlichen Säkularisierungsgrads, d...
In diesem Kapitel werden die in der Arbeit verwendeten statistischen Modelle und Methoden beschrieben. Die statistische Modellierung stellt das Verbindungsglied zwischen den im vorangegangenen Kapitel formulierten theoretischen Variablenbeziehungen und den empirischen Daten dar, anhand derer sich die postulierten Zusammenhänge überprüfen lassen. Ih...
In diesem Kapitel werden die ersten Ergebnisse der empirischen Analyse zum Zusammenhang von Religion und Sozialkapital präsentiert. Im Vordergrund steht dabei die Überprüfung der im Rahmen des Mikromodells aufgestellten Hypothesen und postulierten Wirkungsweisen individueller Religiosität. In Anschluss an Kapitel 3.1 werden neben den zwei verschied...
Warum die empirische Sozialkapitalforschung der Religion erst in allerjüngster Zeit systematische Beachtung schenkt (Smidt 2003: 2) erstaunt vor dem Hintergrund, dass die theoretische Beschäftigung mit Sozialkapital schon von Anfang an mit konkreten Überlegungen zur Religion verwoben war. In der Tat nimmt Religion bereits in den konzeptionellen Ans...
Religiöse Fragen erleben in Deutschland in jüngster Zeit eine Renaissance. Das wird nicht nur an politischen Auseinandersetzungen wie um die Volksabstimmung in Berlin zur Einführung eines konfessionellen Schulunterrichts oder dem plötzlichen Erscheinen vieler auflagenstarker Sachbücher mit "Gott" im Titel deutlich. Das lässt sich auch daran ablesen...
According to the theory of Alexis de Tocqueville, associational life within civil societies is consdiered to be of essential importance for the generation of interpersonal trust. In this article, we take a closer look at the relationship between associational membership and generalized trust. We present an empirical analysis focusing on Switzerland...