Social Studies: Unintended consequences of mandatory voting; debate skills in the workplace

Boston Globe

14-04-2025

Debatable promotions
A study led by an MIT professor found that debate training can improve your chances of attaining leadership positions. In an experiment with a Fortune 100 US company, employees were randomly assigned to either nine weeks of debate training or no debate training. Training took place on Saturdays on Zoom for about two hours, including instruction and then debate practice among participants. Over a year later, employees who had received the training were more likely to have earned a promotion, even controlling for their pretraining management level, tenure, gender, and where they were born. The training increased participants' self-reported assertiveness, which appears to explain the effect on promotions.
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Lu, J. et al., 'Breaking Ceilings: Debate Training Promotes Leadership Emergence by Increasing Assertiveness,' Journal of Applied Psychology (forthcoming).
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When the saints go marching in
According to a recent study, towns in Europe that had stronger religious sentiment — as measured by a long tradition of venerating a saint from early Christianity — were significantly more likely to persecute Jews and/or have witch trials at some point between 1100 and 1850. The good news is that towns that venerated a female saint were less likely to have witch trials.
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Khalil, U. & Panza, L., 'Religion and Persecution,' Journal of Economic Growth (March 2025).
Does size matter — for countries?
There's no consensus among development experts and policymakers about whether economic development is stronger in countries with large or small populations. A key challenge is that population is itself affected by prior development and related factors. To sidestep this to some degree, a new study looked at countries that gained independence between 1946 and 1975. The study found that the smaller of these countries achieved higher levels and rates of economic development in the post-Cold War era. This is attributed to the fact that these countries had to adopt more-open trade policies and larger public sectors after independence. Open trade was needed because a smaller population can't produce as much for itself, while larger public sectors were the result of a smaller population having to allocate a relatively high percentage of its labor force to staff government. In turn, countries dependent on trade favored institutions like property rights and reliable government, while those with larger public sectors promoted political stability.
Bin Khalid, M. & Monroe, S., 'The Blessings of Scarcity: The Cold War Origins of Smaller States' Prosperity,' Perspectives on Politics (forthcoming).