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.

Objectification and dehumanization are topics often discussed within the social psychology and feminist theory literature. Research on objectification has largely focused on the sexual objectification of women’s bodies, whereas the dehumanization literature has focused on dehumanization in the context of racial and ethnic groups. Extant political science research has only recently begun to engage with these concepts. In this manuscript, we build upon these literatures and apply these insights to questions relevant to politics. In particular, we argue that objectifying and dehumanizing portrayals of women impact how voters evaluate women politicians and how much they support gender parity in politics. Through a proposed experimental design, we test our hypothesis that the objectification of women as a group can decrease positive evaluations and likelihood of electoral support for women political candidates.

We document the effectiveness of automated (robo) calls for increasing voter participation in contrast to most published research which finds little or no effect from automated calls. We establish this finding in a large field experiment which mimics campaign behavior with a targeted, partisan get-out-the-vote campaign. Our findings show that across all treatments, automated calls led to three additional votes for every thousand subjects called during the 2014 midterm general election. Additionally, our experimental design allows for testing how the number of calls in a treatment, that is dosage, affects voter turnout. Here, results show that three extra calls increase the treatment effect to seven additional votes per thousand subjects called, but that too many additional calls decrease that effect to statistical insignificance in a six-call treatment.

How does exposure to conspiracy theories affects voters’ political attitudes? Using an online experiment among US subjects, we show that exposure to conspiracy theories decreases voters’ trust in the domestic informational environment. Subjects were exposed to conspiracy theories that are entirely unrelated to American domestic politics, which further underscores such narratives’ danger. However, we fail to reject the null hypothesis that voters do not weigh unrelated conspiracies in their evaluation of politicians’ performance and domestic political institutions. Overall, our findings illustrate that an informational environment permeated by conspiracy theories could impede the functioning of democracy by eroding trust in information providers and undermining the credibility of political information.

In democracies, policy ambitions hinge upon governments’ ability to collect tax revenue from their citizens. Ongoing funding cuts at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) undermine the US government’s ability to fulfill this function. Yet, despite its central importance, funding for IRS enforcement activities has received scant scholarly attention, limiting our understanding of the factors that underlie public attitudes on this issue. In this article, we report the results of preregistered experiments that test whether citizens’ attitudes regarding the IRS can be shaped by framing efforts. Specifically, we test both information-based and value-consistent frames that invoke partisans’ core ideological concerns. Results show that these frames significantly increase public support for the IRS, as well as citizens’ willingness to learn more and become politically active. Thus, to ensure state capacity, information about the consequences of IRS underfunding and appeals to partisans’ ideological concerns can be implemented to increase support for tax collection.

A substantial body of research has found biased recruitment in a variety of societal spheres. We study selection in the judiciary, a domain that has received less attention than the economic and political spheres. Our field experiment took place in the midst of a Swedish government campaign encouraging ordinary citizens to contact local parties, which are responsible for recruiting lay judges (jurors) and put themselves forward as lay judge candidates. Parties’ responsiveness to citizen requests does not seem to favor their own sympathizers, does not vary at all with signals of gender, and is only marginally affected by ethnicity and age. Given the potential importance of ideology and identity in judicial decision-making, the finding that there is little bias with respect to these factors at this first stage of the recruitment process is reassuring from the perspective of impartiality.

Conspiracy theories and misinformation have become increasingly prominent in politics, and these beliefs have pernicious effects on political behavior. A prominent line of research suggests that these beliefs are promoted by repeated exposure. Yet, as scholars have rushed to understand these beliefs, they have exposed countless respondents to conspiratorial claims, raising the question of whether researchers are contributing to their spread. We investigate this possibility using a pre-registered within-subjects experiment embedded in a panel survey. The results suggest that exposure to a standard conspiracy question causes a significant increase in the likelihood of endorsing that conspiracy a week later. However, this exposure effect does not occur with a question format that offers an alternative, non-conspiratorial explanation for the target event. Thus, we recommend that researchers reduce the likelihood of spreading conspiracy beliefs by adopting a question format that asks respondents to choose between alternative explanations for an event.

Overcoming vaccine hesitancy is critical to containing the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. To increase vaccination rates, the State of Ohio launched a million dollar lottery in May 2021. Following a pre-registered analysis, we estimate the effects of Ohio’s lottery program Vax-a-Million on COVID-19 vaccination rates by comparing it to a “synthetic control” composed of eight other states. We find a statistically insignificant 1.3% decrease in the full vaccination rate in Ohio at the end of the lottery period. We investigate the robustness of our conclusion to model specifications through a multiverse analysis of 216 possible models, including longer time periods and alternative vaccination measures. The majority (88%) find small negative effects in line with the results of our pre-registered model. While our results are most consistent with a decrease in vaccination rate, they do not allow a firm conclusion on whether the lottery increased or decreased vaccine uptake.

Email can deliver mobilization messages at considerably lower cost than direct mail. While voters’ email addresses are readily available, experimental work from 2007 to 2012 suggests that email mobilization is ineffective in most contexts. Here, we use public data to reexamine the effectiveness of email mobilization in the 2016 Florida general election. Unsolicited emails sent from a university professor and designed to increase turnout had the opposite effect: emails slightly demobilizing voters. While the overall decrease in turnout amounted to less than 1 percent of the margin of victory in the presidential race in the state, the demobilizing effect was particularly pronounced among minority voters. Compared to voters from the same group who were assigned to control, black voters assigned to receive emails were 2.2 percentage points less likely to turn out, and Latino voters were 1.0 percentage point less likely to turn out. These findings encourage both campaigns and researchers to think critically about the use and study of massive impersonal mobilization methods.

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.

Cognitive appraisal theory predicts that emotions affect participation decisions around risky collective action. However, little existing research has attempted to parse out the mechanisms by which this process occurs. We build a global game of regime change and discuss the effects that fear may have on participation through pessimism about the state of the world, other players’ willingness to participate, and risk aversion. We test the behavioral effects of fear in this game by conducting 32 sessions of an experiment in two labs where participants are randomly assigned to an emotion induction procedure. In some rounds of the game, potential mechanisms are shut down to identify their contribution to the overall effect of fear. Our results show that in this context, fear does not affect willingness to participate. This finding highlights the importance of context, including integral versus incidental emotions and the size of the stakes, in shaping effect of emotions on behavior.

Manipulations checks are postexperimental measures widely used to verify that subjects understood the treatment. Some researchers drop subjects who failed manipulation checks in order to limit the analyses to attentive subjects. This short report offers a novel illustration on how this practice may bias experimental results: in the present case, through confirming a hypothesis that is likely false. In a survey experiment, subjects were primed with a fictional news story depicting an economic decline versus prosperity. Subjects were then asked whether the news story depicted an economic decline or prosperity. Results indicate that responses to this manipulation check captured subjects’ preexisting beliefs about the economic situation. As a consequence, dropping subjects who failed the manipulation check mixes the effects of preexisting and induced beliefs, increasing the risk of false positive findings. Researchers should avoid dropping subjects based on posttreatment measures and rely on pretreatment measures of attentiveness.