Profile of Violeta Haas
Political policies can often have unintended consequences for the groups they aim to help. So
which kinds of policies foster more acceptance among the mass population? Which policies can
trigger unwelcome backlash? And what role do political elites play in manipulating these effects for
their own gain?
Those are the questions Violeta Haas is addressing in her doctoral research. Haas is a PhD
candidate in the RTG Dynamics research group at Humboldt-Universtät zu Berlin and the Hertie
School, where she looks at the effects of LGBTQ rights advancements on public opinion and hate
crimes. She is currently a visiting researcher at Princeton University.
Haas traces the roots of her interest in political science back to her upbringing. “My mom was
always very political. She’s from Chile and was politically active during the dictatorship. So I grew
up with a sense of having to care about what forms of participation I have, and to value them and
to fight for them,” she told me. This interest ultimately led Haas to complete a BA and MA in social
sciences at HU Berlin after finishing school in Aalen, Germany. With some encouragement from
her supervisor, she went on to pursue a PhD in the Dynamics research group.
Her doctoral research addresses policy changes surrounding LGBTQ rights and how the mass
public reacts to those changes. In taking a closer look at the topic, she took note of a puzzling
phenomenon. “There’s an interesting divide, because we see growing support for policies like
same-sex marriage and partnership rights in society. But then also we see growing numbers of
hate crimes and attacks and other human rights abuses that address these groups,” she explained.
The relationship between policy and popular pushback is at the center of her dissertation, which
comprises three papers. The first paper looks at a sentencing reform in the US that bans the
LGBTQ “panic” defense in trials. In states where it’s still allowed, the perpetrator of a hate crime
can use this defense to blame the victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity for the crime. Haas
looks at how the admissibility of these kinds of victim-blaming legal strategies affects the
prevalence of hate crimes, finding that banning the defense leads to a reduction in violent attacks.
In the second study in her dissertation, she turns her attention to Poland and so-called “LGBTQfree
zones”. Those were a series of resolutions introduced by conservative and radical right
politicians in 2019 that were not legally enforceable but nonetheless sent a signal to the public.
She was interested in whether these policies led the party behind them to secure more votes in the
districts where they were introduced. She found that not only did the policies not help that party but they actually cost them votes.
The third and final study is still in progress, but will likely address the effect of different policy
designs on public responses to LGBTQ rights advancements. “There’s this older literature on
policy feedback and how every policy also constructs a certain image of the group that it targets.
So some policies might send more positive constructions of these target groups than others,” she
said. This observation will likely form the basis of the final part of her dissertation.
The driving force behind Haas’s research work is the desire to have a positive impact on the world.
“I hope to help construct policies in a way that can help to secure the rights of the LGBTQ
population, because for me these are human rights. These violent attacks are not an attack only
against an individual but also against the group with which the individual identifies.” She hopes to
be able to help policy makers to design legislation that truly benefits the communities they address,
rather than creating further harm.
Having this kind of real-world impact is at the core of what Haas hopes to achieve. And so when
she saw the potential for the “panic” defense to be used in a current court case in Germany, she
decided that people needed to know about the grave consequences of that kind of legal strategy,
which her research speaks to directly. She reached out to a journalist in order to contribute her
knowledge to the conversation. The article she’s quoted in appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in
March 2023.
Moving into the future, Haas plans to continue her work in academia. She hopes to shift her
research to focus on the roles and responses of political elites to policy changes and also widen
her lens from LGBTQ-related policies to minority rights advancements in general. This could
happen on the path to a professorship, or in another context, as long as her research stays closely
connected to the real world. “I want to be a part of shaping the future for different parts of society
and securing people’s basic rights to participate.”
written by Nad Porter-Kasbati
