Recent studies suggest that online abuse directed at politicians can have negative effects on their public engagement and continued participation in politics. This article considers the broader consequences of such online abuse by testing whether exposure to online abuse of politicians also decreases the prospective political participation of ordinary citizens. In a preregistered survey experiment with 2,000 participants from Denmark, we find that exposing citizens to cases of online abuse of politicians does not have any statistically significant, or substantively meaningful, negative effects on citizens’ prospective political participation. This result holds across multiple measures of political participation and when distinguishing citizens by their gender and level of conflict avoidance. If anything, exploratory analyses indicate that online abuse of politicians may in some cases mobilize citizens who have been bystanders to such abuse.

The US public is mostly ignorant about basic immigration knowledge. While various attempts to correct misperceptions have generally failed to change people’s minds about the issue, it is possible that this failure has been the result of not providing relevant information. We argue that informing the public about the difficulty of the legal immigration admission process is an effective, perspective-changing way to raise support for more open immigration policies. We test and confirm this hypothesis using a nationally representative US survey experiment (N = 1000) that informs respondents about US immigration’s administrative burdens and restrictions through short verifiable narratives. We also provide the first evidence of the widespread ignorance about the immigration process across diverse political and demographic groups. Our results suggest that providing a better understanding of the immigration process’ difficulty has more promise to change public policy preferences than challenging skeptics’ crystallized beliefs about immigration’s effects or numbers.

Text is a major medium of contemporary interpersonal communication but is difficult for social scientists to study unless they have significant resources or the skills to build their own research platform. In this paper, we introduce a cloud-based software solution to this problem: ReChat, an online research platform for conducting experimental and observational studies of live text conversations. We demonstrate ReChat by applying it to a specific phenomenon of interest to political scientists: conversations among co-partisans. We present results from two studies, focusing on (1) self-selection factors that make chat participants systematically unrepresentative and (2) a pre-registered analysis of loquaciousness that finds a significant association between speakers’ ideological extremity and the amount they write in the chat. We conclude by discussing practical implications and advice for future practitioners of chat studies.

Empathy has been proposed as a solution to alleviate interparty antipathy. Recent findings from the US suggest that one aspect of empathy – empathic concern – increases rather than decreases affective polarization. Perspective-taking, another aspect of empathy, has no effect on affective polarization. In this article, we describe a preregistered replication and extension of these findings in the contrasting political context of the Netherlands, to see whether this relationship generalizes beyond the US. First, using a cross-sectional nationally representative sample of 1,258 Dutch voters, we show that empathic concern indeed fuels affective polarization while at the same time we find that perspective-taking reduces it. Second, using a two-arm survey experiment (n = 438), we show that perspective-taking reduces ingroup bias, whereas empathic concern does not. Reflecting on the American and Dutch findings, we conclude that while empathic concern likely contributes to affective polarization, perspective-taking may reduce it.

Every year, Americans elect hundreds of thousands of candidates to local public office, typically in low-attention, nonpartisan races. How do voters evaluate candidates in these sorts of elections? Previous research suggests that, absent party cues, voters rely on a set of heuristic shortcuts – including the candidate’s name, profession, and interest group endorsements – to decide whom to support. In this paper, we suggest that community embeddedness – a candidate’s roots and ties to the community – is particularly salient in these local contests. We present evidence from a conjoint survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of American voters. We estimate the marginal effect on vote share of candidate attributes such as gender, race, age, profession, interest group endorsements, and signals of community embeddedness – specifically homeownership and residency duration. We find that voters, regardless of political party, have strong preferences for community embeddedness. Strikingly, the magnitude of the residency duration effect rivals that of prior political experience.

This study explores the impact of vulnerability appeals during the COVID-19 pandemic using a nationally representative, preregistered survey experiment (N = 4,087) conducted in mid-2021. We explore whether providing citizens with information about the vulnerability of ethnic minority and disabled citizens to COVID-19 fosters empathy and increased support for behavioral restrictions. We observe minimal statistically significant or substantive effects, although the presence of subtle effects cannot be entirely ruled out. We identify some limited indications that individuals with disabilities exhibit increased support for restrictions when exposed to information about the vulnerability of disabled people to COVID-19, but these effects are inconsistent. Therefore, our findings provide limited evidence to confirm or rule out that using vulnerability appeals alone is effective for influencing public attitudes toward behavioral restrictions. The findings point toward avenues for future research, including a closer examination of heterogeneous responses to public health messaging among population subgroups.

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.

This article investigates the effect of priming the existence of corrupt connections to the bureaucracy and of trusted references on the demand for intermediary services. We performed an experimental survey with undergraduate students in Caracas, Venezuela. Participants are presented with a hypothetical situation in which they need to obtain the apostille of their professional degrees in order to migrate and are considering whether to hire an intermediary (“gestor”) or not. The survey randomly reveals the existence of an illicit connection between the gestor and the bureaucracy and whether a trusted individual referred the intermediary. Our findings are not consistent with the “market maker” hypothesis that revealing the existence of illicit connections increases demand. Consistent with the view that trust is a key element in inherently opaque transactions, we find that the demand for intermediaries is price inelastic when gestores are referred by trusted individuals.

Unethical behavior among US judges, including sexual misconduct and other forms of discriminatory behavior, is becoming increasingly publicized. These controversies are particularly concerning given the important role judges play in shaping policy pertaining to individual rights. We argue that types of misconduct serve as a signal to the public about potential threats judges may pose to people, particularly groups of people who are marginalized. We use a survey experiment that introduces a judge who has engaged in misconduct to measure if the type of misconduct will influence attitudes on whether the judge poses a threat to the rights of women, racial minorities, and ethnic minorities. Interestingly, we find that judges accused of discriminatory misconduct toward one group are viewed as a threat to rights across the board and are seen as less able to rule fairly on matters pertaining to marginalized people more generally.

Many international organizations (IOs) rely on voluntary contributions from member states and private actors to fund their operations. Donations from individuals are a significant and increasing income source for these IOs, who rely on marketing strategies such as celebrity endorsement, in the form of Goodwill Ambassadors, to help raise funds. Little is known, however, about the effectiveness of this strategy in the context of IOs although intuition from literatures in marketing and psychology suggests that celebrity endorsement should be effective. We conduct a survey experiment to investigate the effectiveness of Goodwill Ambassadors and, contrary to expectations, find no average effect of celebrity endorsement on donations to, and interest in, IOs and only limited effects among certain sub-groups. We speculate that the context of IOs makes it harder to generate the type of connection between celebrity and cause necessary to make endorsement effective and suggest that further investigation is needed.

Recent research suggests that a strong identity attachment to leisure activity affects the hobbyists’ political preferences and behavior. This paper further evaluates the claim that hobbyists – in this case, gamers – react differently to political stimuli that directly involve their hobby of choice. Using original survey experiment data, this paper shows that gamers become more interested in foreign trade policy when presented in the context of video games. This finding indicates that even seemingly apolitical identities matter in framing political behavior. Aspects of hobbyist identities seep into political attitudes, even if preferences in the strictest meaning of the word may take longer to form.

Education is widely believed to predict attitudes toward immigration, but what causal relationship underlies this descriptive pattern? This research employs three distinct natural experiments and considers genetic factors to triangulate this relationship: Study 1 analyses discordant monozygotic twins; Study 2 assesses the impact of a Swedish education reform; and Study 3 analyses dizygotic twins with the use of a polygenic index for education, a DNA-based measure for genetic predispositions toward education. The results indicate that education does modestly promote open views toward immigration (Study 1), yet the reform’s effect remains uncertain (Study 2). Study 3 offers direct evidence of the effects of genetic predispositions and suggests that genetics related to education may influence attitudes beyond achieved educational attainment. These findings confirm the positive impact of education while pointing to the combined influence of genetic and social pathways in shaping immigration attitudes.