Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in the distribution of scarce resources in contexts like social services, credit, and employment, raising concerns about biased allocations based on characteristics like race and gender. Recent LLM audits have produced inconsistent results, however, finding evidence of both positive and negative discrimination towards women and ethnic minorities, even for the same models. We show that this disagreement can arise from differences in audit format and introduce FairFund-Bench, a benchmark that systematically varies several key features of previous audit designs: the evaluation task (rating, ranking, or allocation), comparison context (single or multi-stimulus), and whether the audit is transparent or disguised. The benchmark comprises 600 requests for financial assistance generated from human-authored templates (calibrated against 1.3M real GoFundMe campaigns) across three domains, four race and two gender categories (signaled using validated names), and five causal framings of need derived from welfare deservingness theory. Across 14 leading models, race and gender biases in allocation are 2-5 times larger in multi-stimulus prompts that make demographic differences less obvious to the model. Causal framing effects, by contrast, exceed any demographic effect on the same task by roughly an order of magnitude and are consistent across models and tasks. Findings highlight how conclusions about bias in current LLMs are sensitive to small differences in audit design. The benchmark scores models on four criteria (demographic bias, normative alignment, cross-task consistency, and cross-context consistency), is publicly available, and can be readily adapted to other substantive domains.
Cosmopolitans Are Nationalists Too: Territorial Identities in European Cleavage Politics
What is the relationship between global and local identification, and how is it linked to political conflict? These questions are central to scholarship on contemporary electoral politics, which has linked the radical right’s rise to a new dimension of political conflict separating tolerant, globally minded voters from exclusionary, locally oriented ones. This cleavage, variously described as universalist–particularist, cosmopolitan–parochial, or globalist–nationalist, implies that collective identification is polarized along a global–local axis and helps drive political mobilization. Yet little is known about how different territorial identities compete with or reinforce each other, let alone how their configurations shape political preferences. Using latent class models and survey data from 35 countries, I find that most Europeans are pluralists, who identify across a range of territories and support mainstream parties. A subset of countries, however, exhibits a division between particularists, who emphasize proximal identities, and expansivists, who emphasize distal ones. Remarkably, both groups converge in their strong attachment to the nation. This division overlaps with educational and geographic divides and separates radical-right supporters from those of new left parties like the greens. The findings demonstrate how collective identities reinforce new electoral divisions while challenging influential accounts of the scope and structure of identity-based polarization.
2025
A Consensus Against False Dichotomies in Crowdfunding?
Martin Lukk, Nora Kenworthy, Erik Schneiderhan, Jeremy Snyder
Journal of Philanthropy, 2025 Crowdfunding & Social Welfare
Our opening pillar article for this special issue argued that the disruptive benefits of digital crowdfunding have been overstated. Responses to our piece draw on diverse cases and perspectives, inviting the field to both broaden its theoretical scope and expand its appreciation of crowdfunding’s wide-ranging empirical manifestations. The exchange also surfaces valuable insights about the current state of crowdfunding scholarship, suggesting a consensus against understanding crowdfunding in terms of simple dichotomies, like good versus bad or oppressive versus liberating, while revealing generative frictions among scholars’ approaches. We identify three unresolved questions about the nature of crowdfunding that emerge from the responses: What is crowdfunding? What does crowdfunding do? How is crowdfunding actually practiced? Answering these questions requires confronting essential debates in the literature, including about crowdfunding’s relationship to autonomy, resistance, and structural change. In search of these answers, the responses highlight the need for expanded empirical research into additional aspects of the phenomenon across different contexts, including the elite networks shaping crowdfunding platforms and ordinary users’ perspectives on agency and resistance. Overall, the dialog calls for future research that develops the field’s critical edge while appreciating the diversity of practices that crowdfunding involves.
Disrupting Philanthropy? A Reality Check for Digital Crowdfunding
Martin Lukk, Nora Kenworthy, Erik Schneiderhan, Jeremy Snyder
Journal of Philanthropy, 2025 Crowdfunding & Social Welfare
Crowdfunding promised to revolutionize philanthropy by using digital technology to make charitable giving cheaper, easier, and more accessible. Has this been realized in practice? We highlight three crucial questions for charity professionals and academic researchers to consider regarding crowdfunding’s “disruptive” capacity, and we answer them in light of nearly a decade of research on crowdfunding for health care and related personal costs. We argue that crowdfunding’s benefits have been largely overstated. Instead of offering a radically novel approach, it puts a digital spin on an outdated charity model. While potentially empowering fundraising recipients, it can significantly undermine their autonomy in practice. And although crowdfunding is commonly used to support health and medical costs, it promotes values and practices that ultimately harm public health systems. Our synthesis highlights the considerable progress scholars have made in understanding this extremely popular, if flawed, approach to charity, and we call for more critical analyses of crowdfunding as it continues to evolve, alongside research into alternative approaches to charitable giving.
2024
Politics of Boundary Consolidation: Income Inequality, Ethnonationalism, and Radical-Right Voting
Scholars have linked income inequality to the recent success of radical-right parties and movements. Yet research shows that inequality reduces participation among groups likely to support the radical right and promotes support for redistribution, an issue championed by the radical left. This raises questions about why, if at all, inequality matters for radical-right politics. The author reconciles previous arguments by developing a theory that connects these phenomena through the process of boundary consolidation. He argues that inequality generates status threats that prompt exclusionary shifts in national group boundaries. This promotes ethnonationalism, a restrictive conception of national membership and, ultimately, support for the radical right, whose mobilization relies on ethnonationalist appeals. Analyses of time-series cross-sectional data from 38 countries support this theory, revealing that inequality is associated with greater ethnonationalism, with distinct associations by income and ethnicity, and that ethnonationalism strongly predicts radical-right voting. The author thus demonstrates how long-term structural changes are linked to contemporary radical politics and how arguments setting economic and cultural causes of the radical right in opposition are inadequate.
2023
GoFailMe: The Unfulfilled Promise of Digital Crowdfunding
Erik Schneiderhan, Martin Lukk
Stanford University Press, 2023 Crowdfunding & Social Welfare
The gaping holes in the U.S. and Canadian social safety nets mean that many people live in a state of financial precarity that can instantly become untenable in the face of another big expense, such as a large medical bill or damaged property. Historically, people have turned to their communities, neighbors, families, and loved ones for help in these situations. Today, asking for money on the internet through crowdfunding is among the most popular ways of seeking and donating to charity, and for-profit enterprises have realized that tapping into this instinct for helping is extremely good business. GoFailMe reveals how these sites, most notably GoFundMe, enjoy massive revenue, without providing the help they promise. They fail most of their users while putting them through an emotional rollercoaster and using sneaky tactics to obscure that reality. With unprecedented access to interviews, surveys, and hundreds of thousands of crowdfunding cases across North America, Erik Schneiderhan and Martin Lukk take on pressing questions with critical insight: When do we turn to others for help? Who succeeds and who fails in the digital crowd? Whom do these sites benefit? Ultimately, the failure of GoFundMe and others is emblematic of the inability of the for-profit sector and Big Tech to engineer an end to social inequality.
Trading Blame: Drawing Boundaries around the Righteous, Deserving and Vulnerable in Times of Crisis
Jordan Foster, David Pettinicchio, Michelle Maroto, Andy Holmes, Martin Lukk
Symbolic boundaries shape how we see and understand both ourselves and those around us. Amid periods of crisis, these boundaries can appear more salient, sharpening distinctions between “us” and “them” and reinforcing inequalities in the social landscape. Based on 50 in-depth interviews about pandemic experiences among Canadians with disabilities and chronic health conditions, we examine how this community distinguishes between the “deserving” and “undeserving”, and how emotions related to blame and resentment inform the boundaries they draw. We find that people with disabilities and chronic health conditions drew boundaries based on unequal health statuses and vulnerabilities and between those who are and are not legitimately entitled to government aid. Underlying these dimensions are a familiar set of moral tropes that respondents use to assert their own superiority and to inveigh their frustrations. Together, they play an important role in solidifying boundaries between groups, complicating public perceptions of policy responses to crisis.
2021
Working Differently or Not at All: COVID-19’s Effects on Employment among People with Disabilities and Chronic Health Conditions
Michelle Maroto, David Pettinicchio, Martin Lukk
Sociological Perspectives, 2021 Crowdfunding & Social Welfare
The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed employment situations for workers everywhere. This is especially true among people with disabilities and chronic health conditions who face greater risks in contracting COVID-19 and experience larger disadvantages within the labor market. Drawing from original data gathered through a national online survey (N = 1,027) and integrated set of virtual interviews (N = 50) with Canadians with disabilities and chronic health conditions, our findings show that although the pandemic has not directly led to job losses for most people with disabilities and chronic health conditions, respondents who have lost employment due to COVID-19 are struggling. Even though employed workers have been faring better, half were concerned about losing their jobs within the next year, and these concerns were more prevalent among part-time and non-union workers. Our findings emphasize the potential for growing economic insecurity as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc on employment situations among marginalized groups.
Findings from an Online Survey on the Mental Health Effects of COVID-19 on Canadians with Disabilities and Chronic Health Conditions
David Pettinicchio, Michelle Maroto, Lei Chai, Martin Lukk
Disability and Health Journal, 2021 Crowdfunding & Social Welfare
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has led to worsening mental health outcomes throughout the Canadian population, its effects have been more acute among already marginalized groups, including people with disabilities and chronic health conditions. This paper examines how heightened fears of contracting the virus, financial impacts, and social isolation contribute to declining mental health among this already vulnerable group. Using original national quota-based online survey data (n = 1,027) collected in June 2020, three logistic regression models investigate the relationship between COVID-19’s effects on finances, concerns about contracting the virus, changes in loneliness and belonging, and measures taken to combat the spread of COVID-19 and reports of increased anxiety, stress, and despair, net of covariates. Models show that increased anxiety, stress, and despair were associated with negative financial effects of COVID-19, greater concerns about contracting COVID-19, increased loneliness, and decreased feelings of belonging. Net of other covariates, increased measures taken to combat COVID-19 was not significantly associated with mental health outcomes. Findings address how the global health crisis is contributing to declining mental health status through heightened concerns over contracting the virus, increases in economic insecurity, and growing social isolation, speaking to how health pandemics exacerbate health inequalities.
Perceptions of Canadian Federal Policy Responses to COVID-19 Among People with Disabilities and Chronic Health Conditions
David Pettinicchio, Michelle Maroto, Martin Lukk
Canadian Public Policy, 2021 Crowdfunding & Social Welfare
This study examines how people with disabilities and chronic health conditions—members of a large and diverse group often overlooked by Canadian public policy—are making sense of the Canadian federal government’s response to COVID-19. Using original national online survey data collected in June 2020 (N = 1,027), we investigate how members of this group view the government’s overall response. Although survey results show broad support for the federal government’s pandemic response, findings also indicate fractures based on disability type and specific health condition, political partisanship, region, and experiences with COVID-19. Among these, identification with the Liberal party and receipt of CERB stand out as associated with more positive views. Further examination of qualitative responses shows that these views are also linked to differing perspectives surrounding government benefits and spending, partisan divisions, and other social and cultural cleavages.
2018
Worthy? Crowdfunding the Canadian Health Care and Education Sectors
Martin Lukk, Erik Schneiderhan, Joanne Soares
Canadian Review of Sociology, 2018 Crowdfunding & Social Welfare
Crowdfunding, the practice of asking for money from others using the Internet, is a major private means through which Canadians are funding their health care and education. Crowdfunding has proliferated in Canada during the 2010s and continues to grow, approaching the revenues of Canada’s major traditional charities. Proponents describe it as an empowering practice from which anyone can benefit. If its gains are inequitably distributed, however, increasing reliance on this private funding mechanism, especially in core areas of welfare state provision, can further exacerbate inequalities of opportunity and income. This study asks why Canadians turn to health care and education crowdfunding and how equitably funds are raised using this novel method. Based on a mixed methods analysis of 319 campaigns conducted on two prominent crowdfunding platforms between 2012 and 2014, we find that crowdfunding users’ needs frequently correspond to known gaps in the contemporary social safety net, including in the area of cancer care, and that campaigns for older and visible minority Canadians face a disadvantage. We argue that health care and education crowdfunding is a response to the shortcomings of Canadian welfare state provision, but one that reproduces offline inequalities with potentially perilous consequences for democratic life and individual suffering.
2016
Response to Ron Haviv
Martin Lukk, Keith Doubt
Human Rights Quarterly, 2016 Political Identity & Conflict
A reply to photojournalist Ron Haviv’s response (HRQ 38(1):208–10) to our article “Bearing Witness and the Limits of War Photojournalism” (HRQ 37(3):629–36). The reply addresses Haviv’s empirical and methodological criticisms and updates the record with newly discovered information about the photograph’s subject—Hajrush Ziberi, an ethnic Albanian from Macedonia whose remains were identified through DNA analysis after being found in the Sava. We use the exchange to restate the aim of the original work: setting aside the photographer’s intentions to better evaluate the unintended and potentially pernicious consequences of photographic practice in contexts of political violence, and to make the case that war photographers are rarely afforded the detached objectivity of forensic photographers but tend to be participants, constitutive of the events they capture.
2015
Bearing Witness and the Limits of War Photojournalism: Ron Haviv in Bijeljina
Martin Lukk, Keith Doubt
Human Rights Quarterly, 2015 Political Identity & Conflict
Photojournalist Ron Haviv’s 1992 photograph of a Bosnian Muslim man on his knees, pleading to the camera for his life in Bijeljina, was taken while Haviv was traveling with Željko “Arkan” Ražnatović’s paramilitary Tigers at the outset of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Analyzing the photograph through Harold Garfinkel’s account of status degradation ceremonies, this article argues that Haviv was not a detached observer but a constitutive participant: the violence in Bijeljina took the form of a degradation ceremony in which the photographer—and, through his images, the watching world—played the structurally indispensable role of witness. War photojournalism’s limits emerge from this involvement. The camera does not stand outside the violence it records, even when the resulting images later serve as evidence, as Haviv’s did at the Hague. Taking the photograph seriously as a sociological event rather than a document raises uncomfortable questions about how bearing witness can sustain, and not only indict, ethnic cleansing.