Political actors face a trade-off when they try to influence the beliefs of voters about the effects of policy proposals. They want to sway voters maximally, yet voters may discount predictions that are inconsistent with what they already hold to be true. Should political actors moderate or exaggerate their predictions to maximize persuasion? I extend the Bayesian learning model to account for confirmation bias and show that only under strong confirmation bias are predictions far from the priors of voters self-defeating. I use a preregistered survey experiment to determine whether and how voters discount predictions conditional on the distance between their prior beliefs and the predictions. I find that voters assess predictions far from their prior beliefs as less credible and, consequently, update less. The paper has important implications for strategic communication by showing theoretically and empirically that the prior beliefs of voters constrain political actors.

The American reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic is polarized, with conservatives often less willing to engage in risk-mitigation strategies such as mask-wearing and vaccination. COVID-19 narratives are also polarized, as some conservative elites focus on the economy over public health. In this registered report, we test whether combining economic and public health messages can persuade individuals to increase support for COVID-19 risk mitigation. We present preliminary evidence that the combination of messages is complementary, rather than competing or polarizing. When given a message emphasizing COVID-19’s negative health and economic effects in a pilot study, conservatives increased their support for a broad range of risk-mitigation strategies, while liberals maintained high levels of support. A preregistered larger-n follow-up study, however, failed to replicate this effect. While complementary frames may be a promising way to persuade voters on some issues, they may also struggle to overcome high levels of existing polarization.

Political elites sometimes seek to delegitimize election results using unsubstantiated claims of fraud. Most recently, Donald Trump sought to overturn his loss in the 2020 US presidential election by falsely alleging widespread fraud. Our study provides new evidence demonstrating the corrosive effect of fraud claims like these on trust in the election system. Using a nationwide survey experiment conducted after the 2018 midterm elections – a time when many prominent Republicans also made unsubstantiated fraud claims – we show that exposure to claims of voter fraud reduces confidence in electoral integrity, though not support for democracy itself. The effects are concentrated among Republicans and Trump approvers. Worryingly, corrective messages from mainstream sources do not measurably reduce the damage these accusations inflict. These results suggest that unsubstantiated voter-fraud claims undermine confidence in elections, particularly when the claims are politically congenial, and that their effects cannot easily be mitigated by fact-checking.

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.

For decades, scholars have discussed how to build greater citizen trust in government. I hypothesize that to increase trust in government, we should consider whether decisions made in bureaucrat–citizen encounters (e.g. applications for welfare benefits) are favorable to citizens. Building on insights from social psychology, I argue that in cases where citizens are presented with unfavorable decisions (e.g. rejection of applications), public employees can mitigate the negative impact on trust in government by appearing warm and friendly in the decision-making process. The argument is tested in a large-scale randomized survey experiment on a representative sample of Danish citizens, where I manipulate decision favorability and warmth. The findings reveal that outcome favorability and warmth strongly influence citizens’ trust in government.

Do discriminatory US immigration policies affect foreign public opinion about Americans? When examining negative reactions to US actions perceived as bullying on the world stage, existing research has focused either on US policies that involve direct foreign military intervention or seek to influence foreign countries’ domestic economic policy or policies advocating minority representation. We argue that US immigration policies – especially when they are perceived as discriminatory – can similarly generate anti-American sentiment. We use a conjoint experiment embedded in a unique survey of Nigerian expatriates in Ghana. Comparing respondents before and after President Trump surpisingly announced a ban on Nigerian immigration to the United States, we find a large drop (13 percentage points) in Nigerian’s favorability towards Americans.

Civil society organizations (CSOs) can facilitate collective action. This makes understanding what shapes whether people are likely to engage with CSOs critically important. This paper argues that whether an organization is perceived as congruent – similar to an individual in values – is a key determinant of whether individuals will engage with it. I use a conjoint survey experiment to test how organizational attributes signaling congruence influence respondents’ willingness to attend a hypothetical organization’s meetings. I find that individuals are more likely to choose organizations that are more likely to be congruent with them, except when it comes to funding. These findings imply that an individual’s level of comfort with a CSO matters for engagement; thus, CSOs need to consider how they match to their publics when reaching out to potential joiners. Furthermore, donors seeking to support CSOs need to pay attention to their impact on perceptions of congruence.

Attitudes toward social out-groups can be improved through “analogic perspective-taking,” whereby respondents are encouraged to use an analogy to take the perspective of the group. It is unclear, however, whether analogic perspective-taking can improve attitudes toward political organizations; how perspective-taking fares compared to the provision of narrative alone; and the limits of the attitude changes it creates. We report results from an experiment that tested analogic perspective-taking exercises about members of teachers’ unions. While perspective-taking improves attitudes toward unions, union members, and willingness to pay more in education taxes, it also increases support for some antiunion policies. A second study suggests that the bidirectional policy effects are attributable to subjects’ difficulty distinguishing pro- from antiunion policies. Analogic perspective-taking can improve attitudes toward social and political groups. But narrative exchange is not always superior to narrative provision, and both approaches may yield mixed effects on policy attitudes.

The number of multiracial candidates seeking office is growing in an increasingly diverse America. This raises questions about how the media frame candidates with potentially complex racial backgrounds and how voters respond to these frames. We investigate the impact of media frames that emphasize race and gender attributes using survey experiments on Kamala Harris—the first Black woman and first Asian woman vice president. Our findings are mixed. In a survey experiment conducted after her nomination, headlines emphasizing different elements of Harris’s race or gender had no impact on public attitudes. In an experiment conducted after Harris was inaugurated, however, headlines that cued her gender only or both her gender and her Black racial background boosted popular support. Taken together, these findings suggest that some types of identity-based cues may matter, but the effects are sensitive to experimental settings and contexts.

Recent efforts to improve attitudes toward outgroups and reduce support for extremists in violent settings report mixed results. Donors and aid organizations have spent millions of dollars to amplify the voices of moderate religious figures to counter violent extremism in West Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Despite this investment, we know little about whether such messaging persuades the primary recruits of violent extremist organizations: at-risk youth in fragile settings. In this paper, we consider whether pro-peace religious messaging can promote social cohesion among school-age respondents in Burkina Faso. Using a survey experiment, we find little evidence that such messages affect reported attitudes or behaviors toward religious extremism and find instead that it can have the unintended effect of increasing intolerance toward ethnic others. Our findings carry lessons about the inadvertent priming of ethnic identities that can result in a backlash effect among certain societal segments.

A consistent finding in industrialized democracies is that having a daughter shapes parents’ attitudes and behaviors in gender-egalitarian ways. We test whether this finding travels to a young middle-income democracy where women’s rights are more tenuous: South Africa. Using a dataset of over 7,500 respondents with information on family structure, we find no discernible effect on attitudes about women’s rights or on partisan identification. We speculate that our null findings relate to opportunity: daughter effects are more likely when parents perceive economic, social, and political opportunities for women. When women’s customary status and de facto opportunities are low, as in South Africa, having a daughter may have no effect on parents’ political behavior. Our results demonstrate the virtues of diversifying case selection in political behavior beyond economically wealthy democracies.

We hired a well-known market research firm whose surveys have been published in leading political science journals, including JEPS. Based on a set of rigorous “screeners,” we detected what appears to be exceedingly high rates of identity falsification: over 81 percent of respondents seemed to misrepresent their credentials to gain access to the survey and earn compensation. Similarly high rates of presumptive character falsification were present in panels from multiple sub-vendors procured by the firm. Moreover, we found additional, serious irregularities embedded in the data, including evidence of respondents using deliberate strategies to detect and circumvent one of our screeners, as well as pervasive, observable patterns reflecting that the survey had been taken repeatedly by a respondent or collection of respondents. This evidence offers reasons to be concerned about the quality of online nonprobability, subpopulation samples, and calls for further, systematic research.