Universal basic income (UBI) is becoming a prominent alternative to reform the welfare state, yet public support for this policy remains a puzzle. Existing scholarship empirically shows that certain groups like the low-income and left-wing show support, but it remains unclear if this translates to a preference for UBI over alternatives. This paper argues against this assumption: UBI challenges welfare norms and deservingness principles, suggesting people would typically prefer means-tested options. Drawing on a conjoint experiment, this paper empirically shows supportive evidence of the idea that support for a UBI does not translate into an inherent preference for UBI. These findings have widespread implications for both the UBI literature and the politics of welfare reform.

What candidates do voters perceive as best to combat corruption? While recent studies suggest that parties recruit women in order to restore legitimacy, we know less about whether voters believe that women candidates are better equipped than male candidates to fight corruption. This study suggests that women mayors are seen as more likely to fight corruption, yet that the credibility of both male and female politicians increases if they are ascribed traits traditionally seen as ‘female,’ including being risk averse or specializing in the provision of welfare services. Leveraging the diverse levels of socio-economic development, corruption, and gender equality across 25 EU member countries, our unique conjoint experiment shows support for these claims. Both women and male candidates benefit from being described as risk averse and prioritizing social welfare issues, while outsider status has no effect. Male candidates, however, have a consistent disadvantage, particularly among women voters. Moreover, the effects of candidate gender are strongest in areas of Europe with the highest levels of political gender equality.

Does providing information about the costs and benefits of automation affect the perceived fairness of a firm's decision to automate or support for government policies addressing automation's labor market consequences? To answer these questions, we use data from vignette and conjoint experiments across four advanced economies (Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US). Our results show that despite people's relatively fixed policy preferences, their evaluation of the fairness of automation—and therefore potentially the issue's political salience—is sensitive to information about its trade-offs, especially information about price changes attributable to automated labor. This suggests that the political impact of automation may depend on how it is framed by the media and political actors.

Why do citizens support or reject climate change mitigation policies? This is not an easy choice: citizens need to support the government in making these decisions, accept potentially radical behavior change, and have altruism across borders and for future generations. A substantial literature argues that political trust facilitates citizen support for these complex policy decisions by mitigating the cost and uncertainty that policies impose on individuals and buttressing support for government intervention. We test whether this is the case with a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in Germany in which we vary fundamental aspects of policy design that are related to the cost, uncertainty, and implementation of climate change policies. Contrary to strong theoretical expectations and previous work, we find no difference between those with low and high trust on their support for different policy attributes, assuaging the concern that low and declining trust inhibits climate policymaking.

Is populism electorally effective and, if so, why? Scholars agree that populism is a set of people-centric, anti-pluralist, and anti-elitist ideas that can be combined with various ideological positions. It is difficult, yet important, to disentangle populism from its hosting ideology in evaluating populism's effectiveness and its potential conditional effects on the hosting ideology. We conduct a novel US conjoint experiment asking respondents to evaluate pairs of realistic campaign messages with varying populism-related messages and hosting policy positions given by hypothetical primary candidates. Although party-congruent policy positions are expectedly much more popular, we find that none of the populist features have an independent or combined effect on candidate choice.

Electoral systems fulfill different functions. Typically, they cannot meet all demands at the same time, so that the evaluation of specific electoral systems depends on subjective preferences about the single demands. We argue that it is the electorate which transfers its power to representatives and, therefore, its preferences should be considered in debates about electoral systems. Consequently, our contribution presents results of citizens’ demands regarding electoral system attributes. Specifically, we rely on a large-scale conjoint experiment conducted in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK in which subjects were asked to choose between two electoral systems which randomly differed on a set of attributes referring to electoral systems’ core functions. Our results show that all core functions are generally of importance for the respondents but reveal a higher preference for proportional electoral systems. These preferences are largely stable for citizens in different countries but also for other subgroups of subjects.

Observational studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that party unity improves a party's electoral performance. Yet, due to a lack of experimental evidence, the causal standing of these findings remains unclear. Moreover, party unity manifests in various ways and we do not know how much different types of party unity affect the vote. Relying on a conjoint experiment implemented in a probability-based survey of the German population, our study unveils the distinct causal effect of different forms of party unity on vote choice. We further establish that appearing united can compensate for substantive policy distances between parties and voters. These findings have important implications for our understanding of how citizens vote and how intra-party politics affects the political representation of citizens in democracies.

Much of the contemporary literature on populism focuses on its status as a “thin” ideology comprising three key components: people-centrism, anti-elitism, and anti-pluralism. Populist politicians pair this “thin” ideology with extreme positions on policy issues such as immigration or taxation (referred to as “host” or “thick” ideologies). A recent study using German samples leveraged conjoint experiments to disentangle the effects of these appeals on vote choice. The results not only showed that extreme host-ideological positions mattered more than so-called “thin” populist appeals, but also that effects of populist appeals were nearly identical among populist and non-populist voters. Our replication in the US context reaffirms both the importance of host-ideological positions and the lack of heterogeneous effects by voters’ “thin” populist attitudes. Furthermore, by uncovering some divergence from the German case (e.g. anti-elite appeals trumping people-centric appeals), we highlight the need to experimentally examine the effects of populism’s constituent components across contexts.

A ‘deliberative wave’, with increasing uses of deliberative citizen forums, is sweeping the globe. Whereas deliberative citizen forum enthusiasts claim that they represent appropriate tools to reconnect citizens with politics and demand a stronger empowerment of deliberative citizen forums, critics argue that they will reduce rather than increase democratic legitimacy. This letter sheds new light on the roles of deliberative citizen forums in democratic systems, with a particular eye on disaffected citizens. Drawing on a conjoint experiment with a representative sample of non-participating German citizens, it shows that citizens in general challenge notions of the strong empowerment of deliberative citizen forums. They prefer deliberative citizen forums that are limited to policy advice, collaborate with legacy institutions and include extra provisions (such as a large size or clear majorities). By contrast, disaffected citizens are more open to the empowerment and decoupling of deliberative citizen forums compared to allegiant citizens, but this not imply that they are generally in clear favour of such design features (in fact, they are mostly indifferent via-à-vis empowerment and decoupling). These findings have important ramifications for democratic designs.

Important challenges like climate change require transformative policy responses. According to a growing public policy literature, such transformative responses typically require complex policy packages that bundle various individual policy instruments to complement each other, compensate transition losers, and create positive synergies. Nevertheless, while adding new instruments to a package can increase policy effectiveness, it comes at a price: increased policy design complexity. Increased complexity potentially leads to fundamental public misperceptions that undermine policy legitimacy and feasibility. Here, I argue that complex policy packages affect public opinion through a compensation, policy perception, and design complexity mechanism. To test this argument, this study assesses if citizens evaluate proposals for isolated climate policies related to food and mobility behaviors differently to complex policy packages. Employing a novel two-stage conjoint-experimental approach with 9115 respondents from the USA and Germany, the study shows that policy packaging increases citizens’ perceived policy effectiveness to reduce climate pollutants, but also perceived restrictions on citizens’ lifestyles. Moreover, increased design complexity can lead citizens to pay special attention to salient costly parts of policy packages. However, increased design complexity does not fundamentally reverse preferences. Through packaging desired and undesired policy instruments, policymakers can increase public support for transformative climate policies.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to study how humans allocate scarce resources in times of hardship. We study public preferences regarding who should get access to government aid for the self-employed, a bed in the intensive care unit, and permission to cross the border using original conjoint survey experiments administered to an incentivised online panel in Switzerland during the first and second waves of the pandemic in 2020. We find that across the three areas, even in extraordinary circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic, evaluations of deservingness to aid and support are still based on an underlying logic of conditional solidarity and identity: in all experiments, contributing to the community, be it through past actions and contributions or through current efforts, plays a crucial role in determining an individual’s deservingness, as does their nationality (and legal status) with nationals being perceived as more deserving than non-nationals.

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.

Does political repression extinguish public support for opposition demands? Protest emerges as a consequence of grievances and political preferences expressed as demands. Although the literature on the repression–dissent nexus has primarily focused on whether repression effectively deters dissenting behavior, a limitation is that researchers do not often distinguish between behavior and preferences. One possible implication is that although the observable protest behavior can be reduced by repression, underlying opposition demands may remain intact or even be strengthened. Hence, the question of why repression should alter public preferences remains theoretically under-investigated, because there is limited micro-level evidence that captures changes in opposition preferences induced by a repressive episode. We fielded comparable conjoint experiments before and after the enactment of the Hong Kong National Security Law in June 2020. Support for the demands was largely stable despite the sweeping powers of the law to curb protests, although some moderation of demands was observed. We outline avenues for future research on mechanisms and implications entailed by the effects of repression on preferences.

Voters’ ideological stances have long been considered one of the most important factors for understanding electoral choices in Chile. In recent years, however, the literature has begun to call this premise into question, due to several changes in the Chilean political landscape: the current crisis of representation, the high programmatic congruence between the two main coalitions, the decline in the political relevance of the dictatorship, and the rise of nonprogrammatic electoral strategies. In addition to these transformations, Chile switched to voluntary voting in 2012. This article studies whether ideology still informs electoral choices in Chile in an era of voluntary voting. It implements a conjoint survey experiment in low-to-middle-income neighborhoods in Santiago, where voters would be expected to be less ideological. It shows that candidates’ ideological labels are crucial for understanding the electoral decisions of a large part of the sample, particularly among likely voters.

One of the strongest findings across the sciences is that publication bias occurs. Of particular note is a “file drawer bias” where statistically significant results are privileged over nonsignificant results. Recognition of this bias, along with increased calls for “open science,” has led to an emphasis on replication studies. Yet, few have explored publication bias and its consequences in replication studies. We offer a model of the publication process involving an initial study and a replication. We use the model to describe three types of publication biases: (1) file drawer bias, (2) a “repeat study” bias against the publication of replication studies, and (3) a “gotcha bias” where replication results that run contrary to a prior study are more likely to be published. We estimate the model’s parameters with a vignette experiment conducted with political science professors teaching at Ph.D. granting institutions in the United States. We find evidence of all three types of bias, although those explicitly involving replication studies are notably smaller. This bodes well for the replication movement. That said, the aggregation of all of the biases increases the number of false positives in a literature. We conclude by discussing a path for future work on publication biases.

Citizens’ concerns about data privacy and data security breaches may reduce the adoption of COVID-19 contact tracing mobile phone applications, making them less effective. We implement a choice experiment (conjoint experiment) where participants indicate which version of two contact tracing apps they would install, varying the apps’ privacy-preserving attributes. Citizens do not always prioritise privacy and prefer a centralised National Health Service system over a decentralised system. In a further study asking about participants’ preference for digital-only vs human-only contact tracing, we find a mixture of digital and human contact tracing is supported. We randomly allocated a subset of participants in each study to receive a stimulus priming data breach as a concern, before asking about contact tracing. The salient threat of unauthorised access or data theft does not significantly alter preferences in either study. We suggest COVID-19 and trust in a national public health service system mitigate respondents’ concerns about privacy.

Contemporary US Supreme Court nominations are unavoidably and inevitably political. Although observers worry that political contestation over nominations undermines support for qualified nominees and threatens the Court's legitimacy, there is little empirical evidence to support these claims. The authors argue that political contestation over judicial nominations provides cues that shape the public's impressions about nominees and the Court and polarizes public opinion across partisan lines. Data from a conjoint experiment administered in the first days of the Trump presidency support this argument. Political rhetoric attributed to President Trump and Senate Democrats substantially polarized partisans’ views of nominees and evaluations of the Court's legitimacy, with Republicans (Democrats) expressing significantly more (less) favorable attitudes. Additional analyses suggest that contestation generates divergent partisan responses by affecting views about the nominee's impartiality. These findings challenge existing perspectives that depict attitudes toward the judiciary as resistant to partisan considerations and have important implications for the Court's legitimacy in a polarized era.