We are quantifying this exact pattern and find:
Israelis double as likely to be described using humanizing frames. Palestinians overwhelmingly described wrt infrastructure damage.
Palestinians 6X more likely to be discussed in relation to their govt. Israelis paired with govt 5% of the time.
I'd love to see studies that:
• Connect peacekeeping strategies to everyday attitudes.
• Measure violence as an outcome. Not attitudes about violence.
• Bring conflictual groups together AND provide psycho-social support to process that interaction.
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*If* grassroots peacebuilding matters, it will be when:
(1) The agents of violence are "normal" individuals, not organized actors or states.
(2) Efforts are large-scale and targeted at groups that might shift elections, when violence *is* state-led.
For that, you need a *shared* identity.
Ideally, one that people can opt in to.
Tension #3: Spikes in national identity increase trust among citizens, but worsen attitudes toward foreigners.
Does building ingroup love always mean increasing outgroup hate?
Tension #2: People listen to messages from trusted leaders that legitimize reconciliation.
But the identities best-suited to “spread the word” --- religious, ethnic --- are the worst ones for building broader cohesion.
Tension #1: Peacebuilding programs try very hard to get people to have a nice time.
Addressing the roots of conflict gives you a better shot at durable change (see: truth commissions).
But can retraumatize.
Is it better to address the elephant in the room --- or talk about anything but?
Heatmap of promising peacebuilding interventions.
Indirect approaches perform better.
Perspective-taking, edutainment, inclusive histories, and elite messaging more consistently reduce prejudice, without the potential backlash of contact.
Lighter touch also means broader reach.
Heatmap of peacebuilding RCTs and backlash effects.
How can we build grassroots peace?
In active or post-war settings, intergroup contact often fails or even backfires.
Contact rarely generalizes unless it's rational to do so.
That requires some structural protections.
Top-down peacemaking works best when:
• mandates are strong
• resources match ambitions.
Peacekeeping correlates with less violence --- but not much causal evidence here.
Big picture:
• We know how conflict shapes attitudes, but not how attitudes shape conflict.
• Inherent mismatch between the unit of observation in peacebuilding studies (the individual) and the outcome of interest --- violence (community-level).
Ending violence is not the same as building peace.
Do grassroots peacebuilding efforts matter for starting or ending wars?
We reviewed the evidence on peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding.... and found 3 tensions.
Now out in Economic Policy:
academic.oup.com/economicpoli...
For a critical, data-driven retrospective on DEI, Keep an eye out for our upcoming book --- Triggered: the Life and Death of DEI!
What did DEI achieve, for whom, and at what cost?
With @lachlanmcnamee.bsky.social and @kylepeyton.bsky.social
Blurb here: t.co/ZUi5qOXYpR
After 20+ years, we can safely say that trickle-down diversity failed in academia.
For that, you need long-term investments in post-docs, mentorship, and other early-career programs.
Which most universities are not incentivized to do. All the cost with none of the visibility and social rewards.
Most Americans support racial equity, diversifying workplaces, and DEI.
But they do *not* like preferential hiring.
Fears of blocked professional advancement among whites and men - fueled by very real, very crude cases - were mobilized by Republican elites to kill the entire DEI movement.
The irony in all this? A conjoint experiment we ran shows students don't care about the race or gender of university presidents.
But they DO care a lot about faculty diversity. There is clear pedagogical value here.
Universities spent 20 years diversifying the roles students care LEAST about.
What explains this?
Academics are hired based on publications, citations, and grant $. Can’t mess with those without internal and legal pressure.
But senior admins are hired based on communication and leadership skills - making these roles easier to diversify without investing in pipelines.
The share of white male assistant professors *has* declined (47%→ 33% from 2004 to 2024).
This is driven by gains among Asian-Americans --- who are super overrepresented relative to Hispanic and Black profs.
There's a real glass ceiling for Asian-Americans in leadership roles, though.
Same pattern for women.
In 2004: 34.7% of senior leaders were women.
In 2024: 58.6%.
This isn’t a weird feature of these universities. 6 out of 8 Ivy League presidents were women by 2023!
But full professors? Moved from 18.2% → 31.1%.
Concrete progress but at half the pace of leadership.
Did anything change after George Floyd?
Senior leadership: +1.08 percentage points more Black after 2020
Assistant Professors: +0.23 percentage points more Black
Leadership was 5x MORE RESPONSIVE to diversity pressures than faculty hiring.
Black representation among full professors has stagnated for 30 years.
It *decreased* from 6.4% → 6.0% between 2004-2024.
But Black representation in senior leadership doubled from 6.7% → 11.6%
The @compactmagazin.bsky.social article relies on cherry-picked data.
Looking at ~5M employee records from public universities, we find:
There isn't a secret cabal of white men pulling the strings — the *top* diversified the most.
The tenure track hasn't been taken over by female or Black profs.
Hi! We hope to have a working paper out soon, I will reach back out.
Would love to be in the loop on what you're working on, too: smousa@ucla.edu
I'm sure things look different by dept, with humanities facing more diversification pressures than STEM. The majority of academic jobs are in STEM.
The employee records make parsing departments difficult. Still, looking at the university as a whole helps appropriately size the problem!
That's definitely possible --- but people (e.g. Compact "Lost Generation" article) fixate on the % Black faculty, which hasn't moved in 30 years. They don't seem to be reacting to where diversification happened; at the top.
Yup. "Backlash" toward DEI driven by conservative elites, not the masses. The trend is even more stark when looking at beliefs about reverse discrimination.
