We report the results of a forecasting experiment about a randomized controlled trial that was conducted in the field. The experiment asks Ph.D. students, faculty, and policy practitioners to forecast (1) compliance rates for the RCT and (2) treatment effects of the intervention. The forecasting experiment randomizes the order of questions about compliance and treatment effects and the provision of information that a pilot experiment had been conducted which produced null results. Forecasters were excessively optimistic about treatment effects and unresponsive to item order as well as to information about a pilot. Those who declare themselves expert in the area relevant to the intervention are particularly resistant to new information that the treatment is ineffective. We interpret our results as suggesting that we should exercise caution when undertaking expert forecasting, since experts may have unrealistic expectations and may be inflexible in altering these even when provided new information.

Are FDI and Islam in conflict with one another in the eyes of Tunisians?  Does support for globalization fall or increase when it embraces or challenges Islamic dress, prayer, and other practices? We examine through different experimental tests how Tunisians react to foreign direct investment when it accommodates or conflicts with Islamic norms. Using three original sources of data, including a large representative survey (N = 4,986), a conjoint survey experiment (N = 1,502), and an original survey experiment with experimental social vignettes (N = 504), we examine how threats (and non-threats) from FDI to Islamic norms affect support for FDI. We find strong support for FDI, but these levels of support are not stable. We find the support for FDI falls by almost 32% if it is seen to clash with female Islamic dress. Support is highest when it accommodates Islamic practices, especially the female hijab and lowest when it is perceived to disregard these practices.

While recent evidence suggests that women exhibit a high capacity to cooperate in all-women groups, existing research focuses on how women cooperate among themselves versus in mixed-gender situations. We still know little, however, about how social differences among women affect their collective action capacity. We examine this by implementing a public goods experiment in Lebanon in which 713 women and men were randomly assigned to play in same-gender groups that were either homogeneous or heterogeneous in their class and sectarian compositions. We show that women contribute significantly less in mixed-class groups while men contribute more, reinforcing that this pattern is unique to women. We also demonstrate that class differences can undermine women’s cooperation more than sectarian differences. These findings highlight how social differences – and class differences in particular – can impede women’s collective action capacity, revealing the potential barriers to building broad, gender-based coalitions to advance women’s rights and interests.

How does the fear of anarchy affect telephone survey behaviors? A survey experiment administered to a sample of Mogadishu residents—validated with a natural experiment—is used to assess this question. Randomly assigned reminders of anarchic violence conditioned differential effects on survey participation depending on subjects’ background level of security and welfare. Vulnerable subjects were more likely than non-vulnerable subjects to refuse to provide sensitive survey information after reminders of anarchy.

In the interest of promoting open and reproducible science, the Journal of Experimental Political Science editorial team will pilot the pre-acceptance of preregistered reports. We note that the launch of this new submission option is a complement to, and does not replace, the option to submit other types of manuscripts. JEPS remains open to receiving and reviewing high quality manuscripts regardless of whether they are based on preregistered studies.

Experiments on the responsiveness of elected officials highlight the tension between the freedom to carry out research and the right of subjects to be treated with respect. Controversy emerges from the power of politicians to block or object to experimental designs using identity deception. One way to resolve this conundrum is to consult citizens who, as constituents of politicians, have an interest in promoting the accountability of elected representatives. Building on the work of Desposato and Naurin and Öhberg, this survey experiment presented research designs to UK citizens for their evaluation. The findings show that citizens strongly approve of experimental research on Members of Parliament (MPs) and are glad to see their representatives participate. There are no differences in support whether designs use identity deception, debriefing, confederates or pre-agreement from MPs. Linked to high interest in politics, more citizens are glad their MPs participate in studies using identity deception than those deploying confederates.

Communication is central to solving coordination problems in politics. In this paper, we show that both the communication network and what people know about the network structure affect coordination. Increases in the number of connections between people make coordination easier and so does increasing the amount of information people have about the structure. We also demonstrate that highly connected nodes in the network can facilitate coordination, but only if individuals have sufficient knowledge to identify the presence of these nodes. Our results suggest the importance of understanding network knowledge and its effects on behavior.

We analyze the results of a neighbor-to-neighbor, grassroots get-out-the-vote (GOTV) drive in Virginia, in which unpaid volunteers were encouraged to contact at least three nearby registered voters who were likely co-partisans yet relatively unlikely to vote in the 2017 state election. To measure the campaign’s effectiveness, we used a pairwise randomization design whereby each volunteer was assigned to one randomly selected member of the most geographically proximate pair of voters. Because some volunteers unexpectedly signed up to participate outside their home districts, we analyze the volunteers who adhered to the original hyper-local program design separately from those who did not. We find that the volunteers in the original program design drove a statistically significant 2.3% increase in turnout, which was concentrated in the first voter pair assigned to each volunteer. We discuss implications for the study and design of future GOTV efforts.

It is with great pleasure that we welcome readers to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Experimental Politics (JEPS). JEPS is the official journal of the Organized Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) on Experimental Research. We are greatly honored to have been selected by the section as the first editors of the journal, and wanted to take this opportunity to briefly share with readers our vision for the journal, some interesting new—dare we say experimental?—policies that we have put in place for the journal, as well as the content in this first issue.

The gender gap in political knowledge is a well-established finding in Political Science. One explanation for gender differences in political knowledge is the activation of negative stereotypes about women. As part of the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program, we conducted a two-stage preregistered and high-powered direct replication of Study 2 of Ihme and Tausendpfund (2018). While we successfully replicated the gender gap in political knowledge – such that male participants performed better than female participants – both the first (N = 671) and second stage (N = 831) of the replication of the stereotype activation effect were unsuccessful. Taken together (pooled N = 1,502), results indicate evidence of absence of the effect of stereotype activation on gender differences in political knowledge. We discuss potential explanations for these findings and put forward evidence that the gender gap in political knowledge might be an artifact of how knowledge is measured.

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically altered all aspects of life, including the creation of trade-offs between the right to vote and health. While many states postponed primary elections, Wisconsin forged ahead with their April 7, 2020 primaries. The result was widely criticized, with health officials raising concerns about the spread of COVID-19 through in-person voting. We argue that concerns from Wisconsin health officials about the potential to contract COVID-19 via in-person voting can shift American’s comfort with using various voting methods in November. We test our hypotheses using a survey experiment on a diverse national sample. We find that information about possible coronavirus exposures decreases comfort with voting in-person yet does not increase comfort with voting by mail. We discuss the implications, including the need to tailor messages to specific features of various methods of voting in order to increase citizens’ comfort with voting in upcoming elections.

Sports victory constitutes an important part of propaganda in authoritarian states. The heavy state investment in sports industries and sports culture in China illustrates the political importance of sports. However, few studies have systematically examined the exact impact of sports propaganda on public opinion. Using a survey experiment conducted in two Chinese cities, this article finds that broadcast highlighting national sports achievements has significant positive effects on general satisfaction and compliance with the local governments. These results expand on the small, but growing, literature on the effects of sports on political opinions and help detail the specific ways in which sports can affect political attitudes.

Research on the link between education and political ideology is likely affected by biases common in conventional observational methods. A study by Rasmussen et al. (2021) addresses this problem by examining social and economic ideology in a Danish discordant twin design, finding that education shows positive causal effects on economic, but not social, conservatism. In this paper, I provide a set of replications of these results using a dataset of genotyped Swedish twins. I complement this by using random variation within fraternal twin pairs in a polygenic index of education. Results differ markedly from the original study, but are also shown to be sensitive to precise definitions of the ideological dimensions and which sub-dimensions or items are included. Overall, more care may be warranted when empirically defining ideology. Additionally, educational effects on ideology are likely to be sensitive to particular characteristics of the educational experience across time and space.

Social choice theory demonstrates that majority rule is generically indeterminate. However, from an empirical perspective, large and arbitrary policy shifts are rare events in politics. The uncovered set (UCS) is the dominant preference-based explanation for the apparent empirical predictability of majority rule in multiple dimensions. Its underlying logic assumes that voters act strategically, considering the ultimate consequences of their actions. I argue that all empirical applications of the UCS rest on an incomplete behavioral model assuming purely egoistically motivated individuals. Beyond material self-interest, prosocial motivations offer an additional factor to explain the outcomes of majority rule. I test my claim in a series of committee decision-making experiments in which I systematically vary the fairness properties of the policy space while keeping the location of the UCS constant. The experimental results overwhelmingly support the prosociality explanation.

Do people judge some forms of wage discrimination to be more unfair than others? We report an experiment in an online labor market in which participants were paid based on discriminatory rules. We test hypotheses about fairness based on procedural justice, divisiveness, and affective polarization between partisans. Workers transcribed text and then learned that they earned more or less money than other workers for doing the same job. We manipulated whether the unequal pay was based on their political party, eye color, or an arbitrary choice between two doors. Consistent with the divisiveness hypothesis, participants judged discriminatory pay to be less fair when it was based on a stable characteristic, political party, or eye color, compared to a transient choice (between doors). We find mixed evidence about how affective polarization exacerbates the unfairness of partisan discrimination. We discuss implications for the procedural justice of wage discrimination.

In many situations, incentives exist to acquire knowledge and make correct political decisions. We conduct an experiment that contributes to a small but growing literature on incentives and political knowledge, testing the effect of certain and uncertain incentives on knowledge. Our experiment builds on the basic theoretical point that acquiring and using information is costly, and incentives for accurate answers will lead respondents to expend greater effort on the task and be more likely to answer knowledge questions correctly. We test the effect of certain and uncertain incentives and find that both increase effort and accuracy relative to the control condition of no incentives for accuracy. Holding constant the expected benefit of knowledge, we do not observe behavioral differences associated with the probability of earning an incentive for knowledge accuracy. These results suggest that measures of subject performance in knowledge tasks are contingent on the incentives they face. Therefore, to ensure the validity of experimental tasks and the related behavioral measures, we need to ensure a correspondence between the context we are trying to learn about and our experimental design.

Recent scholarship in political science identifies emotions as an important antecedent to political behavior. Existing work, however, has focused much more on the political effects of emotions than on their causes. Here, we begin to examine how personality moderates emotional responses to political events. We hypothesized that the personality trait need for affect (NFA) would moderate the emotions evoked by disturbing political news. Drawing data from a survey experiment conducted on a national sample, we find that individuals high in NFA have an especially vivid emotional response to disturbing news—a moderating relationship that has the potential to surpass those associated with symbolic attachments.