Tobias Heinrich

• PhD
• University of Houston

Workers have often advocated for regulation to protect themselves from labor market threats. Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to transform many jobs in the coming years, especially those of white collar professionals. Yet we know little about the attitudes these and other workers hold or may develop toward the regulation of such technology....

Why does the public support government assistance for some firms and workers during hard times but not others? Much research has examined the role of culpability in perceptions of deservingness for workers, but here we develop a deservingness framework that includes both culpability and need considerations, and apply this to an examination of suppo...

Workers have often advocated for regulation to protect themselves from labor market threats. Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to transform many jobs in the coming years, especially those of white collar professionals. Yet we know little about the attitudes these and other workers hold or may develop toward the regulation of such technology....

Effective response to and rapid and reliable detection of infectious disease outbreaks require successful coordination of countries’ border policies early on. As threats from diseases are highly salient to the public, researchers agree that a better understanding of domestic politics is crucial. This article investigates a key piece of this questio...

Borders are hardening across the world because voters are anxious about globalization. However, increased border spending has not reduced people's demand for further border security. To account for this limited feedback, we argue that people and journalists show little interest in learning about increased security and that people would not even rea...

Background In almost all countries, COVID-19 vaccines available for public use are produced outside of that country. Consistent with recent social science research, we hypothesize that legacies of violent conflict from vaccine-producing against vaccine-consuming countries may motivate vaccine hesitancy among people in targeted countries that purcha...

There is an optimism that a growing number of women in political office will reorient the focus of international politics towards more social and humanitarian issues. One basis for this optimism are arguments that women legislators hold distinct foreign policy preferences and act on them to affect changes in policy. However, we know little about ge...

Technology is expected to displace many workers in the future. The public generally supports government assistance for workers viewed as less responsible for their unemployment; thus, we ask whether individuals who lose their jobs to technology are perceived as less at fault and more deserving of government benefits, compared to those who lose thei...

Pundits, development practitioners, and scholars worry that rising populism and international disengagement in developed countries have negative consequences on foreign aid. However, how populism and foreign aid go together is not well-understood. This paper provides the first systematic examination of this relationship. We adopt the popular ideati...

Ending global poverty has been at the forefront of the development agenda since the 1970s, but many donors have failed to target their funds toward this goal. Activists have tackled this issue by appealing to donors' humanitarian motives, but we know little about what explains donors' decisions on how much to give to the poorest countries. Drawing...

Research indicates that susceptibility to having one’s job replaced by technology is associated with candidate and party preferences in affluent democracies, but there is little understanding of why. We investigate whether workers exposed to technology are more supportive of candidates and parties that prioritize the economy, unemployment, and welf...

Background Past survey studies document that people strongly prefer Covid-19 vaccines developed domestically over those developed abroad. Available evidence suggests that this preference for domestic vaccines over foreign ones may stem from prejudice against foreign countries, but identifying prejudice-based vaccine preferences is difficult because...

Observers argue that robots and other advanced technology will eliminate millions of jobs across affluent democracies in the coming decades. But do citizens in affluent democracies recognize this, and if so, does it affect how salient they find economic problems compared to other problems the governments might address? Using a unique Eurobarometer...

Publicity is central to our understanding of both terrorism and counterterrorism, but do people truly react to terrorism in a manner consistent with existing theories? Unlike previous attempts that rely on survey data or media coverage, we turn to global web-search data for observational and behavioral measures of public attention. Specifically, we...

Liberal governments around the world have taken unprecedented emergency measures in the fight against COVID-19. Concerns abound that these newly-authorized measures could fundamentally challenge core liberal values, but citizens strongly supported empowering their governments. How concerned are citizens about the potential entrenchment of these pow...

The COVID-19 pandemic unleashed a global crisis, leading governments to take unprecedented emergency measures in response to this crisis. Civil liberties that are often taken for granted and guaranteed in democracies, such as freedom of movement , freedom of assembly, and privacy, have been sacrificed for greater safety and security across democrat...

Global pandemics are a serious concern for developing countries, perhaps particularly when the same pandemic also affects donors of development aid. During crises at home, donors often cut aid, which would have grave ramifications for developing countries with poor public health capacity during a time of increased demand for health care. Because th...

Global pandemics are a serious concern for developing countries, perhaps particularly when the same pandemic also affects donors of development aid. During crises at home, donors often cut aid, which would have grave ramifications for developing countries with poor public health capacity during a time of increased demand for health care. Because th...

Foreign policy often creates geographically concentrated domestic benefits. A prominent example is the tying of development aid to purchases from the donor country. This feature of aid highlights the utility in examining foreign policy as an instance of pork-barrel politics. Considering tied aid in terms of legislators’ incentives to provide consti...

Recent theories of foreign aid assume that moral motives drive voters’ preferences about foreign aid. However, little is known about how moral concerns interact with the widely accepted instrumental goals that aid serves. Moreover, what effects does this interplay have on preferences over policy actions? This article assesses these questions using...

Foreign policy often creates geographically-concentrated domestic benefits. A prominent example is the tying of development aid to purchases from the donor country. This feature of aid highlights the utility in examining foreign policy as an instance of pork-barrel politics. Considering tied aid in terms of legislators’ incentives to provide consti...

Citizens hold opinions about what kinds of foreign policy their government should pursue. Because foreign policy often has geographically-specific domestic consequences, we expect opinions to vary with the locality of its impact. In this article, we examine whether individual support for US foreign policy to promote democracy abroad depends on exac...

It is well-known that donors give considerably more foreign aid to former colonies than to countries lacking past colonial ties. Unfortunately, we know relatively little about why this is the case. For one, there is almost never a theoretical justification for the inclusion of colonial history in statistical models. For the other, the only explicit...

How do the human rights practices abroad affect decisions about the allocation of foreign aid? This article provides a new approach to this long-standing question. We bring donor government, donor citizens, and recipients’ attributes together in a single analytical framework. We argue that donor citizens are more self-serving than previously assume...

Although foreign policies often fail to successfully promote democracy, over a decade of empirical research indicates that foreign aid specifically for democracy promotion is remarkably successful at improving the survival and institutional strength of fragile democracies. However, these measures cannot tell us how well democracy aid supports the c...

This article studies whether the pursuit of counterterrorism militarizes foreign aid flows. It focuses on the case of US foreign aid to sub-Saharan African states, which recently have experienced an increase in the presence of al-Qaeda or its affiliate terrorist organizations. This article argues that as terrorist groups carry out attacks inside a...

Recent research disputes the conventional wisdom that “sanctions do not work.” It demonstrates that states may impose sanctions for purposes beyond seeking an immediate change in the behavior of targeted regimes. For example, democratic leaders often impose sanctions to satisfy their own domestic constituencies. However, we know little about how th...

Economic crises generally lead to reductions in foreign aid. However, the widely held view that budgetary constraints caused by economic crises reduce aid is inaccurate because donor government outlays actually tend to increase. We develop an argument that aid cuts occur because voters place a lower priority on aid during economic downturns and pol...

The imposition of international economic sanctions is a strategic and often multilateral phenomenon of states attempting to coerce each other into altering their behavior by means of economic pain. The interlocking connections of states issuing sanctions and being sanctioned creates a network of interdependent relations and, we argue, the structure...

The research on foreign aid has long struggled to determine whether giving aid is a selfish or a selfless policy by donors. Instead of looking for evidence for one over the other, I propose examining under which circumstances aid is driven by selfish or selfless motives. A formal model allows for both motives to affect the donor leader’s decision t...

In the literature on sanctions effectiveness, scholars have identified a number of factors that may contribute to sanctions success. However, existing empirical studies provide mixed findings concerning the effects of these factors. This research note explores two possible reasons for this lack of consistency in the literature. First, informed by t...