In light of the growing threat of climate change and urgency of mitigation at the societal and individual level, an exponentially growing body of research has addressed how and what people think about climate change—ranging from basic judgments of truth and attitudes about risk to predictions of future outcomes. However, the field is also beset by a striking variety of items and scales used to measure climate change beliefs, with notable differences in content, untested structural assumptions, and unsatisfactory or unknown psychometric properties. In a series of four studies (total N = 2,678), scales for the assessment of climate change beliefs are developed that are comprehensive and balanced in content and psychometrically sound. The latent construct structure is tested, and evidence of high rank-order stability (1-year retest-reliability) and predictive validity (for policy preferences and actual behavior) provided.

In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade, reversing the nearly 50-year-old landmark decision that affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to abortion. Several months later, voters turned out in record numbers for the 2022 midterms, though a widely predicted “Red Wave” vote did not materialize. There has since been speculation that overturning Roe v. Wade played a crucial role in the midterms, generating a “Blue Tsunami” or “Roevember” driven largely by young, pro-choice women voting out of self-interest. We posit instead that group empathy was the key motivational mechanism in the link between opposition to Dobbs and voter mobilization in that election. Analyzing data from an original national survey, we find that opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade did not directly affect one’s likelihood to vote unless one is empathic toward groups in distress. Such opposition was actually demobilizing for those low in empathy. The findings indicate group empathy serves as a catalyst for people to act on their opposition to policies that harm disadvantaged groups, in this case women as a marginalized political minority losing their constitutional right to bodily autonomy and access to reproductive care.

The development of multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) has allowed scholars to more accurately estimate subnational public opinion using national polls. However, MRP generally recovers less accurate estimates from polls whose respondents are selected using cluster sampling – also called area-probability sampling. This is in part because cluster-sampled polls rely on a complex form of random sampling focused on national representativeness that may result in small or unrepresentative subsamples in subnational geographies. This has limited MRP’s usefulness in subnational opinion estimation in several contexts, including historical polls in the US, where cluster-sampling was common into the 1980s, and large academic studies in many countries today. In this paper, I propose two approaches to improve estimation from MRP with cluster-sampled polls. The first is pooling data from multiple surveys to produce a larger sample of clusters. The second is clustered MRP (CMRP), which extends MRP by modeling opinion using the geographic information included in a survey’s cluster-sampling procedure. Using simulations, I show that both methods improve upon traditional MRP, and I validate them using historical polls in the US

Previous research has shown that positive perceptions of government performance are linked to higher levels of citizens’ support for democracy. However, the policy response to the COVID-19 crisis presented a unique paradox as relative success in preventing the virus spread depended on expanding executive powers, often at the cost of individual freedoms. Exploring this paradox, we investigate whether the link between perceptions of government performance and support for democracy holds in a situation where positive performance essentially means a restriction of freedoms. Using original survey data from seven European countries, we show that notwithstanding the democratic sacrifices, people with positive evaluations of the government’s response are more likely to maintain support for the democratic system. Nevertheless, people weighed responses to the health domain more heavily than to the economic domain, suggesting that the output legitimacy – democratic support link varies across domain-specific evaluations.

How can public opinion change in a pro-immigration direction? Recent studies suggest that those who support immigration care less about it than those who oppose it, which may explain why lawmakers do not enact pro-immigration reforms even when voters are pro-immigration. To see if the personal issue importance of immigration can be changed, I conducted a probability-based, nationally representative US survey experiment (N = 3,450) exposing respondents to verifiable arguments about the broad national benefits of expanding legal immigration and the costs of not doing so. Using new measures of issue importance, my descriptive results show that only one-fifth of voters who prioritize the issue have a pro-immigration preference. Furthermore, while anti-immigration respondents prioritize policies regarding law enforcement and (reducing) future immigration, pro-immigration respondents prioritize (helping) immigrants already here. The experimental results confirm that the provided arguments raised immigration’s importance among pro-immigration voters but did not backfire by mobilizing anti-immigration voters. Contrary to expectations, the arguments increased pro-immigration policy preferences, but did not change voters’ subissue priorities within immigration or their willingness to sign a petition. Overall, the treatment was effective beyond changing minds by shifting stated issue positions and priorities in a pro-immigration direction. It can thus be used in a nontargeted information campaign to promote pro-immigration reforms.

Despite increasing scholarly attention to backlash against feminism, little is known about anti-feminist movements in East Asia. This study examines the 2022 South Korean presidential election campaign, in which the political parties sought to capitalize on political resistance to the perceived advance of feminism. This embrace of male grievance as a political force was arguably led by former People Power Party (PPP) chairman Lee Jun-seok, leading commenters to argue that support for Lee is rooted in misogyny. We examine this claim empirically by drawing on a novel survey to estimate the association between misogynistic attitudes, measured through devaluation, perception of women as manipulative, and distrust, and support for Lee. We find that misogynistic attitudes are positively correlated with support for Lee, but not with presidential vote choice. We interpret this as suggesting that the association between misogyny and support for Lee is a manifestation of the desire for symbolic representation. We discuss the implications of how this association can further influence the gender divide, both in Korea and beyond, and conclude with recommendations for further research.

As survey experiments have become increasingly common in political science, some scholars have questioned whether inferences about the real world can be drawn from experiments involving hypothetical, text-based scenarios. In response to this criticism, some researchers recommended using realistic, context-heavy vignettes while others argue that abstract vignettes do not generate substantially different results. We contribute to this debate by evaluating whether incorporating contextually realistic graphics into survey experiment vignettes affects experimental outcomes. We field three original experiments that vary whether respondents are shown a realistic graphic or a plain text description during an international crisis. In our experiments, varying whether respondents are shown realistic graphics or plain text descriptions generally yields little difference in outcomes. Our findings have implications for survey methodology and experiments in political science – researchers may not need to invest the time to develop contextually realistic graphics when designing experiments.

Are publics in great power democracies more likely to approve of foreign armed combatants that comply with international humanitarian law (IHL)? There is a wealth of evidence that armed combatants with an incentive to seek the support of outside compliance constituencies are more likely to adhere to IHL. Yet a key mechanism underlying these claims—that people in great power democracies are more likely to support armed combatants that comply with IHL—has not been directly tested. We address this question using a series of experiments embedded in nationally representative surveys conducted in three democracies that have frequently been involved in foreign interventions: France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We find that belligerents—both governments and rebels—that comply with the laws of war are significantly more likely to garner support from publics in likely intervening countries compared to those who do not comply. In all three countries, compliance with international law caused greater approval of armed combatants as well as greater support for economic or military intervention (although support for military intervention remained relatively low in the treatment groups). This lends support to arguments that, to the extent combatants seek support from outside audiences, this can serve as a mechanism by which international law constrains armed combat.

Recent controversies over “woke” businesses have challenged traditional partisan political alignments, leading to increased criticism on the right of corporate political activity. This paper explores how the public evaluates corporate political activity, focusing specifically on whether individuals believe corporations are doing too much (or too little) to advance social and political goals. We are especially interested in how social identities and pocketbook considerations shape perceptions of corporate political activities not explicitly tied to social issues. Does racial resentment, for example, influence perceptions of corporate political activity designed to increase worker wages or improve health care? Or are the effects limited to efforts to achieve racial equality? We find that racial resentment and hostile sexism have spillover effects, affecting perceptions of corporate political activity across issue areas. Partisan affiliation, political ideology, and personal pocketbook considerations, in contrast, play a more limited role. Previous research has demonstrated the effect of racial resentment and sexism on support for welfare policies. We add to this literature by showing that racist and sexist opposition extends to corporate political activities that might not be explicitly identified as socially progressive.

Political wrangling over Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the United States has produced policies banning its teaching in jurisdictions across the country. However, laws touted as “anti-CRT” have little in common with the original, academic origins of the phrase. In this study, we use a Qualtrics-based survey experiment to assess how participants’ support for a ban will change depending on whether the ban reflects core tenets of academic researchers’ use of CRT, the phrase itself, or elements common to many of the laws intended to ban it. We find that these three different frames do indeed change support for such policies, and the effects are dependent upon partisanship. We interpret our results to be empirical evidence of the phrase “Critical Race Theory” complicating political discourse.

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine raised for many parties the question of how to position themselves in view of urgently requested arms deliveries. Since, the topic of arms trade, which has hitherto rarely been addressed, has become a heavily politicized and divisive issue and partly even polarized public opinion. A major prerequisite for parties’ position-taking is to anticipate how voters react to such arms transfers and, more specifically, whether their respective attitudes are structured along the predominant left-right axis. Based on a large-scale survey experiment with French and German voters ($N = 6617$) in the year before the Russian invasion, we are able to focus on the relationship between ideological predispositions, vote intentions, and issue attitudes in a non-politicized period. Using both vignette and conjoint experiments, we demonstrate that voters’ attitudes on military transfers can be subsumed remarkably well under the left-right scale. Differentiating the impact of normative and economic considerations, the former is stronger among the left, while the latter also affects the attitudes of rightist citizens. However, normative considerations are the most important concern along the whole political spectrum. The turn of the German Green Party in 2022 to assist countries that are being aggressively attacked (because of the Responsibility to Protect), was not reflected in our data.

The United States has long represented one of Canada's primary international allies. This partnership has remained strong despite turbulent times in the relationship, such as the one brought forth by the Trump presidency. Our article seeks to understand the sources of such continuity through the lens of continentalism. While historical accounts of continentalism have portrayed it as a passive force stemming from Canada's material self-interest, scholars have recently identified the emergence of an evolved form of continentalism that represents a dominant idea and a coherent analytical framework in Canadian foreign policy. Has this new form of continentalism indeed gained widespread acceptance among Canadians? We answer this question by considering continentalism in the ideational realm. Using novel public opinion data, our analysis investigates whether continentalist attitudes have become embedded in Canadians’ national identity and foster closer alignment preferences vis-à-vis the United States. We find significant and robust evidence of such effects.

How well do existing survey instruments differentiate between opinions that affect individual behavior and opinions that don't? To answer this question, we randomly assigned U.S. respondents to one of three survey instruments: Likert items (Likert), Likert items followed by personal importance items (Likert+) and Quadratic Voting for Survey Research (QVSR), which gives respondents a fixed budget to buy “favor” or “oppose” votes, with the price for each vote increasing quadratically. We find that, relative to Likert, both Likert+ and QVSR better identify people who care enough about an issue to act in opinion-congruent ways, with QVSR offering the most consistent improvement overall. Building on these results, we show how conclusions regarding the relationship between policy opinions and self-interest can differ across measurement strategies.

Scholars and policymakers warn that with rising affective polarization, politicians will find support from the public and permission from military professionals to use military force to selectively crack down on political opponents. We test these claims by conducting parallel survey experiments among the US public and mid-career military officers. We ask about two hypothetical scenarios of domestic partisan unrest, randomly assigning the partisan identity of protesters. Surprisingly, we find widespread public support for deploying the military and no significant partisanship effects. Meanwhile, military officers were very resistant to deploying the military, with nearly 75 percent opposed in any scenario. In short, there is little evidence that public polarization threatens to escalate domestic disputes, and strong evidence for military opposition.

Pope Francis has been very active in the public debate on several key social and political issues, gaining a role that foregoes the sphere of religiosity and morality. Overall, he has been perceived by the media and the general public as a leftist figure and even a modernizer. Nonetheless, little is known about the influence of Pope Francis' positions on public opinion, especially beyond the climate change issue and outside the US context. In this regard, this paper contributes to the analysis of the Francis effect on public support for poverty alleviation measures. By employing a survey experiment carried out in Italy, we therefore tested whether the papal endorsement of an anti-poverty measure during the COVID-19 pandemic affected people's support for it. The results highlighted a generalized Francis effect among the Italian public. In addition, trust in the Pope and leftist political orientation substantially enhanced this effect, while the same only partially applies to individual religiosity.