Mathilde Emeriau (Sciences Po, Paris)
Titre : Long-term Effect of Legal Status on Immigrant Integration: Evidence from a Legalization

I study the effect of legal status on the socio-economic integration of undocumented immigrants in France. Since 2006, undocumented immigrants can apply for a one-year residency permit under exceptional circumstances, loosely defined and left to the discretion of the Préfet. Between 2006 and 2015, more than 200,000 immigrants benefitted from this program, the overwhelming majority for family reasons. How does getting legal status affect their integration trajectory? I combine detailed aggregate data on the demographic characteristics of foreigners legalized between 2006 and 2015 with data from the census and labor force surveys, fiscal, judicial, and civil status. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, I compare the trajectories of legalized immigrants to that of other immigrants and model unobserved time-varying confounders using the interactive fixed effects (IFE) model. Even when granted for family reasons, legal status yields substantial improvement in the labor market and poverty reduction. Yet, only those who legalized before the age of 35 seem to be reaping these benefits.

Rafael Jiminez Duran (Università Bocconi , Milan Italie)
Titre : (Dis)engagement with Politics: Evidence from Smartphone Content in the 2024 Elections
Coauthors: Guy Aridor, Ro’ee Levy, Lena Song

Smartphones have become a dominant channel through which people discuss politics and are exposed to political content. Yet, our understanding of these behaviors is limited due to data constraints. Using high-frequency, privacy-preserving data from a commercial smartphone app, we provide the first systematic analysis of exposure to and engagement with political content across all apps that a panel of Android users visit around the 2024 US Election. We establish three main findings. First, despite the highly contested nature of the election, people had limited exposure to political content on their smartphones. On a typical day, the median user encounters up to 33 seconds of political content around the election—equivalent to less than half the terms they would encounter if they read a single New York Times article about the elections. Second, this disengagement remains remarkably stable through the election cycle, except for brief spikes following the presidential debate, Taylor Swift’s endorsement, and on Election Day itself. Third, despite the low individual engagement with political content and the notable differences in the composition of content across apps, a variance decomposition exercise shows that individual heterogeneity is substantially more important than social media app heterogeneity in determining exposure to political keywords. In other words, individuals’ behavior and tastes are a more important driver than systematic social media app‐driven effects in determining political exposures.

Horacio Larreguy (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Mexico, Mexique)
Titre : Polarization and Exposure to Counter-Attitudinal Media in a Nondemocracy

Polarization and Exposure to Counter-Attitudinal Media in a Nondemocracy with Ahmet Akbiyik (Harvard University), Jeremy Bowles (UCL), and Shelley Liu (Duke University) Political polarization is an increasing global concern. Although recent research suggests that media has the potential to mitigate polarization through persuasion, it is unclear whether polarized individuals are willing to consume, and be receptive to information from, diverse news sources. This might especially be the case in nondemocracies where many citizens lack familiarity with credible media sources from across the political spectrum, and some are particularly distrustful of government media. We implement a field experiment in Turkey inducing citizens’ exposure to politically non-aligned online media sources over seven months. Exposure to cross-partisan media outlets increased participants’ consumption of their assigned outlets across the board, but the effects on political attitudes varied based on treatment. Although there was a backlash in the short term, assignment to pro-government media sources led to positive appraisals and voting intentions towards the ruling party in the long term. In contrast, assignment to anti-government media sources positively affected attitudes but not vote intention towards the opposition both in the short and long term. Finally, affective polarization did decrease in the short term, but not in the long term.