Some constitutional scholars suggest that the US Constitution stands as one of the oldest yet least changed national constitutions in part because Americans’ tendency to “revere” the Constitution has left them unwilling to consider significant changes to the document. Several recent studies support aspects of this claim, but no study establishes a direct link between individuals’ respect for the Constitution and their reluctance to amend it. To address this, we replicate and extend the research design of Zink and Dawes (2016) across two survey experiments. The key difference in our experiments is we include measures of respondents’ propensity to revere the Constitution, which in turn allows us to more directly test whether constitutional veneration translates into resistance to amendment. Our results build on Zink and Dawes’s findings and show that, in addition to institutional factors, citizens’ veneration of the Constitution can act as a psychological obstacle to constitutional amendment.

I apply a new theoretical framework to voting to more cohesively bridge the economic cost-benefit model of voting with the psychology-motivated voting-as-a-habit literature. This new theoretical frame gives greater clarity as to how a vote in one election might beget a vote in another election, while yielding testable predictions as to which circumstances are more favorable for developing turnout persistence. To test these predictions, I make use of a novel dataset consisting of nine large-N, door-to-door voter mobilization field experiments in various election contexts (with ∼1.8 million voters in total). Consistent with prior empirical research, my analysis finds that being nudged to vote in one election leads to increased turnout four years later. But the main contribution of this paper is that the theoretical framework’s predictions and the corresponding empirical results make sense of turnout persistence heterogeneities that have been detected in certain prior empirical studies but not others.

This study examines whether politicians exhibit gender bias in responsiveness to constituents’ requests for public service delivery improvements in Uganda. We leverage an in-person survey experiment conducted with 333 subnational politicians, of which one-third are elected to women’s reserved seats. Politicians hear two constituents request improvements in staff absenteeism in their local school and health clinic and must decide how to allocate a fixed (hypothetical) budget between the two improvements. The voices of the citizens are randomly assigned to be (1) male-school, female-health or (2) female-school, male-health. We find no evidence of gender bias toward men versus women, or toward same-gender constituents. This study expands on the mixed results of prior studies examining gender bias in politician responsiveness (typically over email) by adding a critical new case: a low-income context with women’s reserved seats.

Does the process used to pass a law affect the way citizens evaluate the outcome? In a series of experiments, I manipulate the way in which a law is passed – ballot initiative or the legislative process – to test the effect of process on citizens’ evaluations of policy outcomes. The results show that people view the ballot initiative process as fairer than the legislative process, but that process has a negligible effect on outcome evaluations.

Why are prominent news media retractions so rare? Using data from a survey experiment in which respondents view simulated Twitter newsfeeds, we demonstrate the dilemma facing news organizations that have published false information. Encouragingly, media retractions are effective at informing the public – they increase the accuracy of news consumers’ beliefs about the retracted reporting more than information from third parties questioning the original reporting or even the combination of the two. However, trust in the news outlet declines after a retraction, though this effect is small both substantively and in standardized terms relative to the increase in belief accuracy. This reputational damage persists even if the outlet issues a retraction before a third party questions the story. In a social media environment that frequently subjects reporting to intense scrutiny, the journalistic mission of news organizations to inform the public will increasingly conflict with organizational incentives to avoid admitting error.

We are excited and honored to be the editorial team for JEPS. We are indebted to Eric Dickson for his efforts as the journal's previous editor. He set a high bar for JEPS as an outlet for high quality experimental research. Lucky for us, the healthy state of experimental research means that we will continue to have a deep pool of well-crafted and important work. We also thank Nick Haas, who deftly guided us through the transition as Editorial Assistant. Without his help, it would have been a near impossible task to get up to speed.

Despite broad adoption of digital media literacy interventions that provide online users with more information when consuming news, relatively little is known about the effect of this additional information on the discernment of news veracity in real time. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of how information impacts discernment of news veracity has been hindered by challenges of external and ecological validity. Using a series of pre-registered experiments, we measure this effect in real time. Access to the full article relative to solely the headline/lede and access to source information improves an individual's ability to correctly discern the veracity of news. We also find that encouraging individuals to search online increases belief in both false/misleading and true news. Taken together, we provide a generalizable method for measuring the effect of information on news discernment, as well as crucial evidence for practitioners developing strategies for improving the public's digital media literacy.

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study the incentives of a privileged group (the “yellows”) to share political power with another group (the “blues”). The yellows collectively choose the voting rule for a general election: a simple-majority rule that favors them, or a proportional rule. In two treatments, the blues can use a costly punishment option. We find that the yellows share power voluntarily only to a small extent, but they are more inclined to do so under the threat of punishment, despite the fact that punishments are not sub-game perfect. The blue group conditions punishments both on the voting rule and the electoral outcome.

Israel is viewed unfavorably among wide segments of the public within several European democracies, despite being regarded itself as a Western democracy. Does drawing attention to Israel's democratic attributes improve views toward Israel? In two surveys with Dutch national samples, anti-Semitic affect, low anti-Arab/Muslim affect, and left-wing political orientation independently predicted anti-Israel sentiment. However, in experiments embedded within the surveys, making salient Israel's democratic attributes had opposite effects on Israel attitude across those on the right and the left – slightly decreasing anti-Israel sentiment among those with a right-wing orientation but slightly increasing anti-Israel sentiment among those with a left-wing orientation. We discuss potential explanations grounded in social psychological theory as well as implications for the strategic communication efforts of groups seeking to influence attitudes toward Israel.

Is people’s willingness to implement their fairness views on a group dependent on how many in the group share their view? We designed a new experiment to answer this question. Spectator participants were asked how many other participants they believe share their view of whether it is fair to redistribute income in a work task. They were then given the option to pay two cents to implement the distribution they found fair upon a pair of participants who had completed the work task. Although spectator participants systematically overestimate how many share their fairness view, being informed about the true number does not affect their decision to implement the distribution they found fair. The results suggest that people are motivated to implement their fairness view regardless of whether their view is at odds with that of those who are affected.

Research on policy shifts has found that repositioning can be costly as it affects candidates’ perceived honesty, reliability, and competence. It remains unclear, however, whether a politician’s gender affects perceptions of repositioning. Research on gender stereotypes has found that while male politicians are viewed as more competent, decisive, and displaying strong leadership, female politicians are believed to be more honest. Applying expectancy-violation theory, I test the hypothesis that the reputational cost of repositioning is more pronounced for female politicians in a preregistered survey experiment fielded on a large convenience sample in Flanders, Belgium (n = 6,957). I find that while frequent repositioning is evaluated negatively, the negative effect of repositioning is not more pronounced for female candidates than for male candidates on most outcome measures.

During health crises, misinformation may spread rapidly on social media, leading to hesitancy towards health authorities. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted significant research on how communication from health authorities can effectively facilitate compliance with health-related behavioral advice such as distancing and vaccination. Far fewer studies have assessed whether and how public health communication can help citizens avoid the harmful consequences of exposure to COVID-19 misinformation, including passing it on to others. In two experiments in Denmark during the pandemic, the effectiveness of a 3-minute and a 15-second intervention from the Danish Health Authorities on social media was assessed, along with an accuracy nudge. The findings showed that the 3-minute intervention providing competences through concrete and actionable advice decreased sharing of COVID-19-related misinformation and boosted their sense of self-efficacy. These findings suggest that authorities can effectively invest in building citizens’ competences in order to mitigate the spread of misinformation on social media.

Research suggests that interacting with women may encourage civic and prosocial attitudes, yet findings to date have been limited to democracies notable for their egalitarian norms. Using simulated contact experiments under controlled conditions, this article tests hypotheses for the first time in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, arguably “hard cases” given persistent norms of patriarchy and gender segregation. Yet, despite stronger contexts for male dominance, results suggest that interacting with women may indeed steer Saudi and Kuwaiti men toward more civic and other-regarding orientations, including aspects of tolerance, egalitarianism, openness, and community rule-following. These findings add much-needed comparative perspective to experimental research on mixed-gender dynamics and align with broader work highlighting the benefits of diverse interactions for groups and nations.