TY - JOUR A1 - Munzert, Simon A1 - Selb, Peter A1 - Gohdes, Anita R. A1 - Stoetzer, Lukas F. A1 - Lowe, Will T1 - Tracking and Promoting Usage of a COVID-19 Contact Tracing App. JF - Nature Human Behavior N2 - Digital contact tracing apps have been introduced globally as an instrument to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, privacy by design impedes both the evaluation of these tools and the deployment of evidence-based interventions to stimulate uptake. We combine an online panel survey with mobile tracking data to measure the actual usage of Germany’s official contact tracing app and reveal higher uptake rates among respondents with an increased risk of severe illness, but lower rates among those with a heightened risk of exposure to COVID-19. Using a randomized intervention, we show that informative and motivational video messages have very limited effect on uptake. However, findings from a second intervention suggest that even small monetary incentives can strongly increase uptake and help make digital contact tracing a more effective tool. Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?2397-3374 IS - 5 SP - 247 EP - 255 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Munzert, Simon A1 - Ramirez-Ruiz, Sebastian A1 - Çalı, Başak A1 - Stoetzer, Lukas F. A1 - Gohdes, Anita R. A1 - Lowe, Will T1 - Prioritization preferences for COVID-19 vaccination are consistent across five countries JF - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications N2 - Vaccination against COVID-19 is making progress globally, but vaccine doses remain a rare commodity in many parts of the world. New virus variants require vaccines to be updated, hampering the availability of effective vaccines. Policymakers have defined criteria to regulate who gets priority access to the vaccination, such as age, health complications, or those who hold system-relevant jobs. But how does the public think about vaccine allocation? To explore those preferences, we surveyed respondents in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United States from September to December of 2020 using ranking and forced-choice tasks. We find that public preferences are consistent with expert guidelines prioritizing health-care workers and people with medical preconditions. However, the public also considers those signing up early for vaccination and citizens of the country to be more deserving than later-comers and non-citizens. These results hold across measures, countries, and socio-demographic subgroups. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01392-1 VL - 9 IS - 439 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stoetzer, Lukas F. A1 - Munzert, Simon A1 - Lowe, Will A1 - Çalı, Başak A1 - Gohdes, Anita R. A1 - Helbling, Marc A1 - Maxwell, Rahsaan A1 - Traunmüller, Richard T1 - Affective partisan polarization and moral dilemmas during the COVID-19 pandemic JF - Political Science Research and Methods N2 - 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 experiment in five countries we analyze the influence of patients’ partisanship next to commonly discussed factors determining access to intensive medical care. We find that while participants’ choices are consistent with a utilitarian heuristic, revealed partisanship influences decisions across most countries. Supporters of left or right political camps are more likely to withhold support from partisan opponents. Our findings offer comparative evidence on affective polarization in non-political contexts. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.13 SP - 1 EP - 8 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jugl, Marlene A1 - Pagel, William A. M. A1 - Garcia Jimenez, Maria Camilla A1 - Salendres, Jean Pierre A1 - Lowe, Will A1 - Malikova, Helena A1 - Bryson, Joanna T1 - Spamming the regulator: exploring a new lobbying strategy in EU competition procedures JF - Journal of Antitrust Enforcement N2 - Regulation plays a central role in modern governance; yet, we have limited knowledge of how subjects of regulation—particularly, private actors—act in the face of potentially adverse regulatory decisions. Here, we document and examine a novel lobbying strategy in the context of competition regulation, a strategy that exploits the regulator’s finite administrative capacities. Companies with merger cases under scrutiny by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition appear to be employing a strategy of ‘spamming the regulator,’ through the strategic and cumulative submission of economic expert assessments. Procedural pressures may result in an undeservedly favourable assessment of the merger. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of an original dataset of all complex merger cases in the European Union 2005–2020, we present evidence of this new strategy and a possible learning process among private actors. We suggest remedies to ensure regulatory effectiveness in the face of this novel strategy. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/jaenfo/jnad009 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jankin, Slava A1 - Lowe, Will A1 - Benoit, Kenneth A1 - Laver, Michael T1 - Scaling Policy Preferences From Coded Political Texts JF - Legislative Studies Quarterly N2 - Scholars estimating policy positions from political texts typically code words or sentences and then build left-right policy scales based on the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. Here we reexamine such scales and propose a theoretically and linguistically superior alternative based on the logarithm of odds- ratios. We contrast this scale with the current approach of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), showing that our proposed logit scale avoids widely acknowledged flaws in previous approaches. We validate the new scale using independent expert surveys. Using existing CMP data, we show how to estimate more distinct policy dimensions, for more years, than has been possible before, and make this dataset publicly available. Finally, we draw some conclusions about the future design of coding schemes for political texts. Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-27945 VL - 36 IS - 1 SP - 123 EP - 155 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Benoit, Kenneth A1 - Laver, Michael A1 - Lowe, Will A1 - Jankin, Slava T1 - How to scale coded text units without bias: A response to Gemenis JF - Electoral Studies N2 - Coding non-manifesto documents as if they were genuine policy platforms produced at election time clearly raises serious issues with error when these codings are used in the standard manner to estimate left-right policy positions. In addition to the long term solution of improving the document base of the Manifesto Project identified by Gemenis (2012), we argue that immediate gains in manifesto-based estimates of policy positions can be realised by using the confrontational logit scales from Lowe et al. (2011), which addresses the problems of scale content and scale construction that are exacerbated by but not unique to the problems found in proxy documents. Y1 - 2012 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-28033 IS - 3 SP - 605 EP - 608 ET - 31 ER -