During the COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC and the WHO have recommended face masks as key to reducing viral transmission. Yet, in the USA, as the first wave erupted in the Summer of 2020, one-fifth of individuals said they wore masks at most “some of the time”, and a majority said that people in their community wore masks at most “some of the time”. What strategies most effectively encourage compliance with this critical COVID-19 prevention measure? Relying on social identity theory, we experimentally assess two possible mechanisms of compliance, elite endorsement, and social norms, among a representative sample of white US-born Evangelicals, a group that has shown resistance to prevention measures. We find evidence for both mechanisms, but social norms play a remarkably important role – increasing support for mask-wearing by 6% with spillover effects on other prevention guidelines. Our findings confirm the role that appeals to norms and elite endorsements play in shaping individual behavior and offer lessons for public health messaging.

Previous work on nonverbal cues has demonstrated the influence of candidates’ facial displays on voter preferences. However, the idea that visual cues affect political judgment by signaling the relative social solidarity (in-group vs. out-group status) between candidates and voters has received little attention. We fill this gap by experimentally manipulating facial cues associated with the physical features of gender and ethnicity (Afrocentric vs. Eurocentric-looking) and assessing their effects on candidate support in the context of the Italian 2013 general election. The experimental design is based on a CAWI post-election online survey conducted on a representative sample of Italian voters. We find that group differences between candidates and voters matter, but only among right of center voters, who respond more negatively to party candidates expressing “combined” (party x gender x ethnicity) dissimilarity. Gender- and ethnicity-based differences are, on the contrary, “assimilated” and accepted when the target candidate is from the voter's party.

This study explores the impact of repression of foreign protests and the media source reporting the news upon American foreign policy preferences for democracy promotion abroad. We use two survey experiments featuring carefully edited video treatments to show that even short media clips presenting foreign protests as violently repressed increase American support for targeted sanctions against the hostile regime; however, these treatments alone do not inspire respondents to political action. Furthermore, we do not find evidence that mobile treatment magnifies the effects of violence.

Which institutional features do Latin American elites favor for local climate change policies? Climate change mitigation requires active local-level implementation, but it remains unclear which institutional arrangements maximize support for environmental rules. In this paper, we run a conjoint experiment with elite members of 10 Latin American countries and ask respondents to evaluate institutional designs drawn from a pool of 5,500 possible local climate governance arrangements. We find that Latin American elites prefer international organizations to formulate climate policies, support imposing increasing fines on violators, and favor renewing agreements every 5 years. We also find that elites support both international institutions and local courts to mediate conflicts, but they distrust non-governmental organizations and reject informal norms as a means of conflict resolution. Our results identify possible challenges in crafting local climate mitigation policies and offer new insights about how to integrate local and international levels in environmental agreements.

I investigate the extent to which reputational incentives affect policy choices in the context of a controlled laboratory experiment. In theory, asymmetric information and outcome unobservability undermine electoral delegation by creating incentives for politicians to pander. Under the right conditions, it may be preferable to remove such incentives by removing accountability altogether. The data suggest that subjects playing the role of politicians fail to take advantage of voters even though voters indeed create the predicted electoral incentives, albeit in a weaker form than predicted by the theory. When given the choice of institutions via a novel elicitation method, subjects prefer to retain electoral accountability or to make decisions themselves through direct democracy, even though both institutions yield lower expected payoffs than delegation to unaccountable agents.

Incentivized experiments are frequently used to learn about individuals’ social, political, and economic behavior. However, public officials and other individuals are sometimes barred from accepting payment for anything related to their position, so money cannot be used in experiments (e.g., Butler and Kousser 2015). We assess whether donations to charity can be used to incentivize public officials, as an alternative to traditional monetary inducements.

China’s rise is ushering in a new era of geostrategic contestation involving foreign aid. In many traditional OECD donors, aid policy is changing as a result. We report on a survey experiment studying the impacts of rising Chinese aid on public opinion in traditional donors. We randomly treated people with vignettes emphasising China’s rise as an aid donor in the Pacific, a region of substantial geostrategic competition. We used a large, nationally-representative sample of Australians (Australia is the largest donor to the Pacific). As expected, treating participants reduced hostility to aid and increased support for more aid focused on the Pacific. Counter to expectations, however, treatment reduced support for using aid to advance Australian interests. These findings were largely replicated in a separate experiment in New Zealand. Knowledge of Chinese competition changes support for aid, but it does not increase support for using aid as a tool of geostrategy.

Anti-corruption research has highlighted the potential for grassroots monitoring to improve governance outcomes, but the conditions under which citizens are willing to report bribery remain under-studied. Are individuals from some societies socialized into a “culture of corruption” that makes them more accepting of malfeasance, or is the failure to denounce wrongdoing simply a response to low-quality enforcement institutions? I conduct a laboratory experiment to examine how the propensity to report corruption differs between Northern and Southern Italians, two populations experiencing different levels of corruption in everyday life. For each group, I experimentally manipulate the quality of enforcement institutions. When given high-quality institutions, all participants are more willing to report corruption. Moreover, Southerners and Northerners behave similarly when placed within the same institutional environments. These results suggest that high-corruption societies are not “culturally” predisposed to tolerate malfeasance. Rather, improving the capacity of enforcement institutions may significantly strengthen accountability norms.

Early research suggested that education was a major factor in structuring rates of political participation and social capital. More recent work based on experimental or quasi-experimental evidence offers mixed findings. In this study, we enlist a unique research setting in Romania, where passing the baccalaureate is required for entrance into university, setting up the occasion for a fuzzy RD design. The sample is drawn from a cross section of Romanians whose scores fall just above or below the cutoff. Because the sample is large and the measurement of exam scores are fine-grained, it is plausible to regard the outcome as continuous at the cutoff. Because the number of exam takers is enormous, we are able to focus on a very narrow bandwidth. The assumption of as-if random assignment is, therefore, plausible. We find that university attendance in Romania increases social capital as measured by our composite index, corroborating the main hypothesis.

Recent research suggests widespread misperception about the political views of others. Measuring perceptions often relies on instruments that do not separate uncertainty from inaccuracy. We present new experimental measures of second-order political beliefs. To carefully measure political (mis)perceptions, we have subjects report beliefs as probabilities. To encourage accuracy, we provide micro-incentives for each response. To measure learning, we provide information sequentially about the perception of interest. We illustrate our method by applying it to perceptions of vote choice in the 2016 presidential election. Subjects made inferences about randomly selected American National Election Study (ANES) respondents. Before and after receiving information about the other, subjects reported a probabilistic belief about the other’s vote. We find that perceptions are less biased than in previous work on second-order beliefs. Accuracy increased most with the delivery of party identification and report of a most important problem. We also find evidence of modest egocentric and different-trait bias.

The deadly outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has accompanied a worldwide surge in anti-Asian hate crimes and racial violence. In this paper, I experimentally assess the downstream effects of the health crisis on the racial attitudes of the American public. Survey respondents were randomly assigned to different messages about COVID-19 and its association with China and answered a battery of racial attitude questions, including a new measure of anti-Asian racial resentment. Across all outcome measures, I find null effects for both treatment messages, which suggests that racialized views toward Asians may be stable individual-level dispositions that have shaped American responses to the pandemic. Findings from this study have important implications for research on the far-reaching societal and political consequences of the pandemic in the United States and beyond.

In spite of its immense global impact, Republicans and Democrats disagree on how serious a problem the coronavirus pandemic is. One likely reason is the political elites to whom partisans listen. As a means of shoring up support, President Trump largely downplayed but at times hyped the severity of the virus. Do these messages influence the perceived seriousness of the virus’s death toll, how the president is evaluated as well as support for and compliance with social distancing guidelines? Results suggest that Republican identifiers had by early June crystallized their views on the virus’s seriousness, the president’s performance, and social distancing policies and behaviors. Unexpectedly, information critical of President Trump’s policy decisions produced a backlash causing people to show less concern about the virus’s death toll and rate the president’s performance even more highly.

How does exposure to conspiracy theories affects voters’ political attitudes? Using an online experiment among US subjects, we show that exposure to conspiracy theories decreases voters’ trust in the domestic informational environment. Subjects were exposed to conspiracy theories that are entirely unrelated to American domestic politics, which further underscores such narratives’ danger. However, we fail to reject the null hypothesis that voters do not weigh unrelated conspiracies in their evaluation of politicians’ performance and domestic political institutions. Overall, our findings illustrate that an informational environment permeated by conspiracy theories could impede the functioning of democracy by eroding trust in information providers and undermining the credibility of political information.

Does providing information about police shootings influence policing reform preferences? We conducted an online survey experiment in 2021 among approximately 2,600 residents of 10 large US cities. It incorporated original data we collected on police shootings of civilians. After respondents estimated the number of police shootings in their cities in 2020, we randomized subjects into three treatment groups and a control group. Treatments included some form of factual information about the police shootings in respondents’ cities (e.g., the actual total number). Afterward, respondents were asked their opinions about five policing reform proposals. Police shooting statistics did not move policing reform preferences. Support for policing reforms is primarily associated with partisanship and ideology, coupled with race. Our findings illuminate key sources of policing reform preferences among the public and reveal potential limits of information-driven, numeric-based initiatives to influence policing in the US.

In Coppock (2014), I presented a reanalysis of Butler and Nickerson (2011), a field experiment that tested the effects of providing state legislators district-level public opinion data on their roll call votes for a bill. The reanalysis employed a method introduced by Bowers et al. (2013) to conclude that the Butler and Nickerson estimate of the total effect of treatment was biased downward; when spillovers were accounted for, the total effect of treatment was estimated to be nearly twice as large.

We examine the role of status quo bias in the ballot wording of social issues that affect the rights of minority groups. We test the salience of this framing bias by conducting an experiment that randomly assigns different ballot wordings for five policies across survey respondents. We find that status quo bias changes the percent of individuals who vote for the ballot measure by 5–8 percentage points with the least informed individuals being the most affected by status quo bias.

Public health officials have faced resistance in their efforts to promote mask-wearing to counter the spread of COVID-19. One approach to promoting behavior change is to alert people to the fact that a behavior is common (a descriptive norm). However, partisan differences in pandemic mitigation behavior mean that Americans may be especially (in)sensitive to information about behavioral norms depending on the party affiliation of the group in question. In July–August 2020, we tested the effects of providing information to respondents about how many Americans, co-partisans, or out-partisans report wearing masks regularly on both mask-wearing intentions and on the perceived effectiveness of masks. Learning that a majority of Americans report wearing masks regularly increases mask-wearing intentions and perceived effectiveness, though the effects of this information are not distinguishable from other treatments.

Seattle, Washington instituted a new “democracy voucher” program in 2017 providing each registered voter with four $25 campaign finance vouchers to contribute to municipal candidates. Prior research shows that without efforts to mobilize voters, electoral reforms like the voucher program are often insufficient to increase participation among underrepresented groups. We examine how mobilization affects the voucher program’s redistributive goals – does it increase participation among infrequent voters, or does it engage regular participants in politics? In the 2017 election cycle, we partnered with a coalition of advocacy organizations on a field experiment to estimate the effects of providing voters with information about democracy vouchers through door-to-door canvassing, texting, digital advertisements, and e-mails. While mobilization increased voucher use and voter turnout, responsiveness was greatest among frequent voters. As our findings suggest that transactional mobilizing is insufficient to engage infrequent participants, we posit that deeper organizing is necessary to fulfill the program’s redistributive goals.

Perhaps hundreds of survey experiments have shown that political party cues influence people’s policy opinions. However, we know little about the persistence of this influence: is it a transient priming effect, dissipating moments after the survey is over, or does influence persist for longer, indicating learning? We report the results of a panel survey experiment in which US adults were randomly exposed to party cues on five contemporary US policy issues in an initial survey and gave their opinions. A follow-up survey 3 days later polled their opinions again. We find that the influence of the party cues persists at ∼50% its original magnitude at follow-up. Notably, our design rules out that people simply remembered how they previously answered. Our findings have implications for understanding the scope and mechanism of party cue influence as it occurs in the real world and provide a benchmark for future research on this topic.

The basis of social identity in Afghanistan is the concept of qawm. As qawm refers to an individual’s solidarity group, such as village, tribe, subtribe, or even ethnic group, it captures broad in-group/out-group distinctions. We analyze a survey experiment to explore how qawm affiliation affects individual perceptions of politicians running for a fictitious local election. Contrary to expectations derived from the literatures on Afghanistan and on identity politics, we find qawm affiliation does not influence voter choice or perceived importance that a fellow qawm member should be elected. Moreover, qawm affiliation actually undermines individual perceptions a candidate will work on behalf of voters if elected. We explore two general mechanisms that may explain these findings, including weakening social ties and salience of the qawm.