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The implementation of punishment has proven a prominent solution to prevent the breakdown of cooperation in social dilemma situations. In fact, numerous studies show that punishment possibilities are effective in maintaining cooperative behavior. However, punishment is often not efficient in terms (a) of monetary benefits and in light of the fact (b) that punishment of cooperators (i.e., antisocial punishment) can occur. Still, recent research revealed that individuals vote for the implementation of such punishment systems. We address this contradiction by proposing that the benefits of democratic punishment systems in particular cannot be solely captured by monetary outcomes. Instead, the implementation of democratic punishment systems may enhance the psychological benefits of justice perceptions, satisfaction, and trust. Using iterated public goods games, the findings of the present study reveal not only higher cooperation levels and total payoffs in two different democratic punishment systems compared to other systems, but also higher justice perception, satisfaction, and trust. Furthermore, participants indicated the highest willingness to continue interactions in democratic punishment systems. Moreover, satisfaction, not monetary outcomes, was the best predictor of participants' willingness to stay in a system. Therefore, we argue that the efficiency of democratic punishment systems cannot be measured solely in monetary outcomes but that psychological benefits must be considered.

The implementation of punishment has proven a prominent solution to prevent the breakdown of cooperation in social dilemma situations. In fact, numerous studies show that punishment possibilities are effective in maintaining cooperative behavior. However, punishment is often not efficient in terms (a) of monetary benefits and in light of the fact (b) that punishment of cooperators (i.e., antisocial punishment) can occur. Still, recent research revealed that individuals vote for the implementation of such punishment systems. We address this contradiction by proposing that the benefits of democratic punishment systems in particular cannot be solely captured by monetary outcomes. Instead, the implementation of democratic punishment systems may enhance the psychological benefits of justice perceptions, satisfaction, and trust. Using iterated public goods games, the findings of the present study reveal not only higher cooperation levels and total payoffs in two different democratic punishment systems compared to other systems, but also higher justice perception, satisfaction, and trust. Furthermore, participants indicated the highest willingness to continue interactions in democratic punishment systems. Moreover, satisfaction, not monetary outcomes, was the best predictor of participants' willingness to stay in a system. Therefore, we argue that the efficiency of democratic punishment systems cannot be measured solely in monetary outcomes but that psychological benefits must be considered.

These data were collected as part of PushBackLash's Work Package on anti-gender discourses online to analyze anti-gender equality strategies on Twitter/X to develop typologies of mobilization and counterstrategies. This analysis contributes to the creation of a toolkit for online actors in the field. The dataset was collected between July 2023 and December 2023 and contains tweets between 2018 and 2023. The Twitter/X data set consists of approximately 60,000 Tweet IDs from 110 public accounts. First, important pro- and anti-gender equality actors in the European Union were identified. Next, actors who were active on Twitter/X since 2021 or earlier were considered for the data collection. Due to changes implemented by Twitter/X in March 2023 (removal of free access to the X API and strict limitations of number of tweets that can be scraped) the list of identified actors was reduced to the most influential ones based on follower numbers, while simultaneously ensuring that actors from all core countries of the PUSH*BACK*LASH project were included. For each actor we scraped on average ~500 tweets. After scraping tweets from the initial list of actors, new actors were added based on those most-commonly mentioned in the scraped tweets. Data was scraped using the X API V2 and the R package RTwitterV2. In line with the X regulations, the data set only contains Tweet IDs.

In recent years, deliberative democracy has drawn attention as a potential way of fighting polarization. Allowing citizens to exchange arguments and viewpoints on political issues in group, can have strong conflict-mitigating effects: it can foster opinion changes (thereby overcoming idea-based polarization), and improve relations between diametrically opposed groups (thereby tackling affective forms of polarization, such as affective polarization). However, these results conflict with social psychological and communication studies which find that communicative encounters between groups can lead to further polarization and even group think. The question therefore arises under which conditions deliberative interactions between citizens can decrease polarization. Based on a multidisciplinary systematic review of the literature, which includes a wide diversity of communicative encounters ranging from short classroom discussions to multi-weekend citizen assemblies, this paper reports several findings. First, we argue that the effects of communicative encounters on polarization are conditional on how those types of communication were conceptualized across disciplines. More precisely, we find depolarizing effects when group discussions adhere to a deliberative democracy framework, and polarizing effects when they do not. Second we find that the depolarizing effects depend on several design factors that are often implemented in deliberative democracy studies. Finally, our analysis shows that that much more work needs to be done to unravel and test the exact causal mechanism(s) underlying the polarization-reducing effects of deliberation. Many potential causal mechanisms were identified, but few studies were able to adjudicate how deliberation affects polarization.