Studies on discrete emotions typically work to evoke one emotion at a time. Yet many political phenomena cause multiple emotions. Threats, for example, cause, anger, and fear, have diametrically opposing behavioral consequences. As a result, the effect of experimental treatments can be masked by the countervailing influence of emotions with similar affect. This issue is exacerbated by existing measures of negative emotions, such as the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). We show that the PANAS is contaminated by systematic measurement error, as negative affect produced by one emotion influences responses on the other. To overcome this, we develop an alternative version of the PANAS that allows respondents to select which emotions they are feeling, then rate the severity. This technique accurately captures respondent’s emotional reactions, reducing measurement error and thus decreasing the correlation between fear and anger. The tactics we developed have broad relevance for experimental researchers analyzing emotional responses to politics.

Despite corruption’s effects on citizen welfare, there is substantial variation in when citizens are willing to sanction government wrongdoing. This paper uses a conjoint survey experiment, conducted in Uganda, to test how information about the position a corrupt official holds, and the details of an act of embezzlement affect citizens’ perceptions of corruption severity and willingness to punish. I find that the revenue source of stolen funds and the sector to which the funds had been allocated have the largest impact on perceived severity, followed by whether stolen funds are spent privately or recirculated through patronage or clientelism. The position the corrupt official holds has a smaller impact on severity, including whether the official was elected and whether he was a central or local official.

While recent evidence suggests that women exhibit a high capacity to cooperate in all-women groups, existing research focuses on how women cooperate among themselves versus in mixed-gender situations. We still know little, however, about how social differences among women affect their collective action capacity. We examine this by implementing a public goods experiment in Lebanon in which 713 women and men were randomly assigned to play in same-gender groups that were either homogeneous or heterogeneous in their class and sectarian compositions. We show that women contribute significantly less in mixed-class groups while men contribute more, reinforcing that this pattern is unique to women. We also demonstrate that class differences can undermine women’s cooperation more than sectarian differences. These findings highlight how social differences – and class differences in particular – can impede women’s collective action capacity, revealing the potential barriers to building broad, gender-based coalitions to advance women’s rights and interests.

In democracies, majority-rule voting is an esteemed rule for collective decisions, but its hazards have recently become apparent after a series of controversial referendums and ascendant populist leaders. Here, we investigate people’s judgments about when voting is appropriate for collective decisions across five countries with diverse cultures and political institutions (Denmark, Hungary, India, Russia, and USA). Participants read scenarios in which individuals with conflicting preferences need to make a collective decision. They judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. We experimentally manipulated whether the group contains a vulnerable minority – a smaller number of people with more at stake than the majority. In all five countries, participants generally preferred voting without a vulnerable minority, with relatively greater support for voting in more democratic countries. But, when the group included a vulnerable minority, participants in all countries reduced their support for voting and instead preferred consensus.

According to the burgeoning voter mobilization field experiments literature, impersonal contact has little-to-no effect. A conversation with a computer is, by definition, an impersonal interaction. However, chatbots are form of communication wherein a computer imitates conversations by interacting using natural language. Human-to-chatbot interactions are often perceived as similar to human-to-human interactions. How ubiquitous are chatbots? Just ask Siri, Cortana, Bixby, or Alexa, or ask for help on any e-commerce website (these are each chatbots). A simple voter mobilization treatment reminding users of a political chatbot (Resistbot) to vote and providing information about polling locations and hours increased turnout by 1.8 percentage points in a 2019 election. The results replicate previously unpublished field experiments by Resistbot in 2018 that found smaller but statistically significant increases in turnout.

Immigration is highly salient for voters in Europe and the USA and has generated considerable academic debate about the causes of preferences over immigration. This debate centers around the relative influences of sociotropic or personal economic considerations, as well as noneconomic threats. We provide a test of the competing egocentric, sociotropic, and noneconomic paradigms using a novel constrained preference experiment in which respondents are asked to trade off preferred reductions in immigration levels with realistic estimates of the personal or societal costs associated with those reductions. This survey experiment, performed on a national sample of British YouGov panelists, allows us to measure the price-elasticity of the publicʼs preferences with regard to levels of European and non-European immigration. Respondents were willing to admit more immigrants when restriction carries economic costs, with egocentric considerations as important as sociotropic ones. People who voted for the UK to Leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum are less price-elastic than those voting Remain, indicating that noneconomic concerns are also important.1

Scholars, the media, and ordinary people alike express alarm at the apparent loathing between Democrats and Republicans in the mass public. However, the evidence of such loathing typically comes from survey items that measure attitudes toward the Democratic and Republican Parties, rather than attitudes toward ordinary partisans. Using a nationally representative survey, I find that Democrats and Republicans have substantially more positive feelings toward ordinary people belonging to the opposing party than they do toward politicians in the opposing party and the opposing party itself. These results indicate that research relying on measures of feelings toward the opposing “Party” vastly overstates levels of partisan animosity in the American public and demonstrate the need to distinguish between attitudes toward party elites and ordinary partisans in future research.

Does citizen approval of vote buying depend on the type of benefit being offered? I answer this question using data from a survey experiment conducted on a nationally representative sample of Nicaraguans in 2017. Nicaraguans report significantly lower approval of money-for votes exchanges compared to goods-for-votes exchanges. Furthermore, reported rates of vote buying are lower in the money condition (4.8%) than in the goods-for-votes condition (7.8%), even though the posttreatment question assessing vote buying experience was identical across conditions. This study echoes other work suggesting the need for care in designing questions about vote buying, as slight changes in question wording that prime participants to think about goods versus monetary exchanges can affect both citizen approval of the behavior and the reported prevalence of vote buying.