CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar - Silvia Sonderegger

Title: Divided We Act: Political Polarization, Social Sanctions, and Strategic (Un)Fairness

Absract: Political polarization influences how people judge fairness and enforce social norms, shaping both economic and social behavior. We study how polarization and normative uncertainty affect fairness-based decision-making and strategic behavior using a two-wave experiment that leverages the 2024 U.S. presidential election as an exogenous shock to partisan beliefs, preferences, and norms. Participants allocate monetary resources between recipients of opposing political identities (Trump supporters versus opponents) in both private (unobserved) and public (observed) settings. In public settings, decisions can be punished by partisan observers whose normative views vary across three environments: tight (low variance), loose (high variance), and polarized (bimodal). We find that polarized environments lead to more extreme and unequal allocations, driven by the strategic anticipation of punishment. The results highlight that polarization and normative uncertainty can undermine fairness, with important consequences for social cohesion in increasingly divided societies.