How can political elites strengthen citizen commitment to democratic norms when democracy is under imminent assault? We report results from a pre-registered survey experiment on the persuasive effects of actual speeches given by prominent Republican politicians (Schwarzenegger, McConnell) shortly after the January 2020 insurrection at the U.S. capitol. Although both speeches were widely considered effective at the time, in a survey experiment among Republican voters, we find no impact of one-time exposure to these speeches on the endorsement of democracy, the acceptance of election losses, the rejection of political violence, or the relevance of democratic norms in hypothetical vote choices.

Misinformation is widely seen as a threat to democracy that should be promptly addressed by scholars, journalists, and policymakers. However, some of the debated solutions are either controversial (internet platform regulation) or may be difficult and costly to implement in many settings (fact-checking corrections). This study investigates the effectiveness of preemptive interventions, a type of solution that has received considerably less attention in this debate. Studies show that interventions through awareness and media literacy campaigns can inoculate citizens against misinformation, but these interventions are restricted to a few contexts and settings. Our paper uses two field experiments, one of which was conducted in partnership with Brazil’s main newspaper, to investigate the effectiveness of multidimensional interventions against misinformation in São Paulo. The findings show that preemptive interventions can indeed reduce rumor acceptance and provide insights into the strategies to combat misinformation in democracies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this paper, we provide an empirical test for the theoretical claim that ambiguous nuclear threats create a “commitment trap” for American leaders: when deterrence fails, supposedly they are more likely to order the use of nuclear weapons to avoid domestic audience costs for backing down. We designed an original survey experiment and fielded it to a sample of 1,000 U.S. citizens. We found no evidence of a commitment trap when ambiguous nuclear threats are made. Unlike explicit threats, ambiguous ones did not generate domestic disapproval when the leader backed down; the decision to employ nuclear weapons led to more public backlash for the leader than being caught bluffing; and the threats did not influence public preference for nuclear use across our scenarios. Our findings contribute to the scholarly literature on nuclear crisis bargaining and policy debates over the future of US declaratory policy.

Classic theories of public opinion suggest that negative shocks can undermine system support in weak democracies, but scant work has systematically assessed this thesis. We identify Peru’s explosive Vacuna-gate scandal as a most-likely case for finding a connection between corruption and political support. The scandal’s unexpected revelation in the middle of the 2021 AmericasBarometer Peru survey created conditions for a natural experiment. Applying an unexpected-event-during-survey design, we consider the consequences of the scandal for perceptions of corruption, system support, and support for democracy. We find robust evidence that the scandal increased even already high perceptions of corruption and lowered system support. Contrary to expectations derived from prior theories, we find no effect on explicit support for democracy. In the conclusion, we discuss the nuanced ways that scandal may shape democratic stability.

Electoral rules can affect who wins and who loses elections. Most cities select office holders through plurality rule, but an alternative, ranked-choice voting (RCV), has become increasingly popular. RCV requires voters to rank candidates, instead of simply selecting their most preferred candidate. Observers debate whether RCV will cure a variety of electoral ills or undermine representation. We test the effect of RCV on voter’s choices and perceptions of representation using survey experiments with large, representative samples of respondents. We find that candidates of color are significantly penalized in both plurality and RCV elections, with no significant difference between the rule types. However, providing respondents with candidates’ partisan affiliation significantly increases support for candidates of color.

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.

It is widely thought that lobbyists exert influence over legislators’ policy positions and, as a result, over policy outcomes. One mechanism of influence is the provision of policy expertise. Yet, there is little credible empirical evidence that lobbyists’ expertise influences legislative outcomes. Across four experiments fielded with three lobbyists in two state legislatures that examine two public measures of legislators’ positions, we find no evidence that lobbyists’ expertise influences legislators’ policy positions. We do find, in contrast, that the same policy expertise treatment is influential when provided by a legislative staffer. We conclude that policy information can influence legislators’ positions, but that legislators are cautious when that information is provided by lobbyists.

Experimentalists and survey researchers regularly measure the makeup and size of respondent personal discussion networks to learn about the social context in which citizens make political choices. When measuring these personal networks, some scholars use question prompts that specifically ask respondents about whom they discuss “politics” with, while others use more general prompts that ask respondents about whom they discuss “important matters” with. Prior research suggests that “political” discussion network prompts create self-reported networks that are substantively similar to “important matters” prompts. We conduct a nationally representative survey experiment to re-evaluate this question. Our results suggest that, although the size of networks generated by the two questions may be similar on average, the two questions generate different response distributions overall. In particular, respondents interested in politics report larger political discussion networks than general discussion networks, and respondents uninterested in politics report smaller political discussion networks than general discussion networks.

How does political ideology affect the processing of information incongruent with one’s worldview? The disagreement in prior research about this question lies in how one’s ideology interacts with cognitive ability to shape motivated numeracy or the tendency to misinterpret data to confirm one’s prior beliefs. Our study conceptually replicates and extends previous research on motivated numeracy by testing whether monetary incentives for accuracy lessen motivated reasoning when high- and low-numeracy partisans interpret data about mask mandates and COVID-19 cases. This research leverages the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, as Americans are polarized along party lines regarding an appropriate government response to the pandemic.

Misinformation about events surrounding the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic pose an existential threat to American democracy and public health. Public opinion surveys reveal that high percentages of Republicans indicate that they endorse some aspects of mistaken beliefs surrounding election fraud in the 2020 election. Still, understanding how to measure the endorsement of misperceptions is critical for understanding the threat at hand. Are high levels of mistaken beliefs genuinely held, or are they partially a function of expressive responding? I address this question through a set of survey experiments encouraging accuracy-oriented processing among the general public. Using well-powered surveys of Republicans and Independents, I find that treatments designed to encourage more accurate responses are ineffective in reducing the endorsement of partisan electoral and public health misperceptions and can in some cases even backfire. These findings suggest that support for these misperceptions is genuinely held.

As the number of people of color (PoC) grows in the United States, a key question is how partisanship will develop among this important electoral group. Yet many open questions remain about PoC partisanship, due to limited availability of panel data, a lack of sensitive instrumentation, and small samples of PoC in most public opinion surveys. This brief report leverages a unique panel of African American (N = 650) and Latino (N = 650) eligible voters, before and after the 2020 Presidential Election between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump. Using measures that tap expressive partisan, racial, and national identity attachments, we find that Biden’s electoral victory significantly intensified partisan identity among his Democratic PoC supporters, relative to PoC who were not Democrats and supported Trump. We do not find significant changes in racial or national identities. Our results advance research on PoC’s partisanship.

The 2020 presidential election brought expanded vote-by-mail opportunities, a rise in attacks on this process’s integrity, and the implementation of novel programs such as California’s Where’s My Ballot? system to ensure confidence in mail balloting. Can heightening awareness of this ballot-tracking system and other election protections alleviate fraud concerns and raise turnout? We assess whether messages reinforcing election integrity increased participation in the 2020 election through a large-scale voter mobilization field experiment. California registrants were mailed a letter that described either existing safeguards to prevent vote-by-mail fraud or the ability to track one’s ballot and ensure that it was counted. Analysis of state voter records reveals that neither message increased turnout over a simple election reminder or even no contact, even among subgroups where larger effects might be expected. In the context of a high-profile, high-turnout presidential election, assurances about ballot and electoral integrity did not increase turnout.

Political elites increasingly express interest in evidence-based policymaking, but transparent research collaborations necessary to generate relevant evidence pose political risks, including the discovery of sub-par performance and misconduct. If aversion to collaboration is non-random, collaborations may produce evidence that fails to generalize. We assess selection into research collaborations in the critical policy arena of policing by sending requests to discuss research partnerships to roughly 3,000 law enforcement agencies in 48 states. A host of agency and jurisdiction attributes fail to predict affirmative responses to generic requests, alleviating concerns over generalizability. However, across two experiments, mentions of agency performance in our correspondence depressed affirmative responses – even among top-performing agencies – by roughly eight percentage points. Many agencies that initially indicate interest in transparent, evidence-based policymaking recoil once performance evaluations are made salient. We discuss several possible mechanisms for these dynamics, which can inhibit valuable policy experimentation in many communities.

By exacerbating a pre-existing crisis of childcare in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many parents to renegotiate household arrangements. What shapes parents’ preferences over different arrangements? In an online conjoint experiment, we assess how childcare availability, work status and earnings, and the intra-household division of labor shape heterosexual American parents’ preferences over different situations. We find that while mothers and fathers equally value outside options for childcare, the lack of such options – a significant feature of the pandemic – does not significantly change their evaluations of other features of household arrangements. Parents’ preferences over employment, earnings, and how to divide up household labor exhibit gendered patterns, which persist regardless of childcare availability. By illustrating the micro-foundations of household decision-making under constraints, our findings help to make sense of women’s retrenchment from the labor market during the pandemic: a pattern which may have long-term economic and political consequences.

Political parties and civic organizations disseminate information to improve citizen decision making in local elections. Do citizens choose to consume such information and, if so, how does it affect their decisions? We conduct a survey experiment during a real-world local election that randomly assigns 1) political party endorsements, 2) a voter guide, 3) no information, or 4) a choice among these options. Respondents assigned to receive party endorsements and a voter guide are more likely than respondents receiving no information to choose candidates who share their policy views. When given a choice, a majority opts to receive information (including many with low levels of political interest), with most respondents preferring a voter guide. Using an instrumental variable approach, we show that the effect of information on those who choose to receive it is substantial. These results offer hope that voter education efforts can succeed despite widespread political disinterest.