In spite of its immense global impact, Republicans and Democrats disagree on how serious a problem the coronavirus pandemic is. One likely reason is the political elites to whom partisans listen. As a means of shoring up support, President Trump largely downplayed but at times hyped the severity of the virus. Do these messages influence the perceived seriousness of the virus’s death toll, how the president is evaluated as well as support for and compliance with social distancing guidelines? Results suggest that Republican identifiers had by early June crystallized their views on the virus’s seriousness, the president’s performance, and social distancing policies and behaviors. Unexpectedly, information critical of President Trump’s policy decisions produced a backlash causing people to show less concern about the virus’s death toll and rate the president’s performance even more highly.

Early research suggested that education was a major factor in structuring rates of political participation and social capital. More recent work based on experimental or quasi-experimental evidence offers mixed findings. In this study, we enlist a unique research setting in Romania, where passing the baccalaureate is required for entrance into university, setting up the occasion for a fuzzy RD design. The sample is drawn from a cross section of Romanians whose scores fall just above or below the cutoff. Because the sample is large and the measurement of exam scores are fine-grained, it is plausible to regard the outcome as continuous at the cutoff. Because the number of exam takers is enormous, we are able to focus on a very narrow bandwidth. The assumption of as-if random assignment is, therefore, plausible. We find that university attendance in Romania increases social capital as measured by our composite index, corroborating the main hypothesis.

What explains divides in the public’s support for trade protection? Traditional economic arguments primarily focus on individuals’ expectations for increased or decreased wages in the face of greater economic openness, yet studies testing such wage-based concerns identify a different divide as well: even after accounting for wage effects, women are typically more supportive of trade protection. We argue that trade-induced employment volatility and the resulting concerns for employment stability are overlooked factors that help explain the gender divide in attitudes. Due to both structural discrimination and societal norms, we theorize that working women are more responsive to the threat of trade-related employment instability than male counterparts. Using an experiment fielded on national samples in the USA and Canada, we find that most respondents have weak reactions to volatility, but volatility has a significant effect on women who are the most vulnerable to trade’s disruptive effects – those working in import-competing industries and those with limited education.

This study explores the impact of repression of foreign protests and the media source reporting the news upon American foreign policy preferences for democracy promotion abroad. We use two survey experiments featuring carefully edited video treatments to show that even short media clips presenting foreign protests as violently repressed increase American support for targeted sanctions against the hostile regime; however, these treatments alone do not inspire respondents to political action. Furthermore, we do not find evidence that mobile treatment magnifies the effects of violence.

We conducted a field experiment with 334 Canadian Members of Parliament exploring whether politicians seek out more information about an issue when they are farther offside the average opinion in their constituency on that issue. In the midst of a contentious national debate on the oil industry, we invited MPs and their staff to watch a webinar or read a written summary of the webinar created by experts and containing a variety of viewpoints on the issue. For politicians on either side, the information could prove useful in future debate and conversation. Some politicians were randomly assigned to information about the distribution of opinion in their constituency on the issue. We find no evidence that politicians are more likely to pursue policy information when they are offside their average constituency opinion, and none that this effect is enhanced when they learn about their relative position vis-a-vis constituency preferences.

Psychological attachment to political parties can bias people’s attitudes, beliefs, and group evaluations. Studies from psychology suggest that self-affirmation theory may ameliorate this problem in the domain of politics on a variety of outcome measures. We report a series of studies conducted by separate research teams that examine whether a self-affirmation intervention affects a variety of outcomes, including political or policy attitudes, factual beliefs, conspiracy beliefs, affective polarization, and evaluations of news sources. The different research teams use a variety of self-affirmation interventions, research designs, and outcomes. Despite these differences, the research teams consistently find that self-affirmation treatments have little effect. These findings suggest considerable caution is warranted for researchers who wish to apply the self-affirmation framework to studies that investigate political attitudes and beliefs. By presenting the “null results” of separate research teams, we hope to spark a discussion about whether and how the self-affirmation paradigm should be applied to political topics.

Recent research suggests widespread misperception about the political views of others. Measuring perceptions often relies on instruments that do not separate uncertainty from inaccuracy. We present new experimental measures of second-order political beliefs. To carefully measure political (mis)perceptions, we have subjects report beliefs as probabilities. To encourage accuracy, we provide micro-incentives for each response. To measure learning, we provide information sequentially about the perception of interest. We illustrate our method by applying it to perceptions of vote choice in the 2016 presidential election. Subjects made inferences about randomly selected American National Election Study (ANES) respondents. Before and after receiving information about the other, subjects reported a probabilistic belief about the other’s vote. We find that perceptions are less biased than in previous work on second-order beliefs. Accuracy increased most with the delivery of party identification and report of a most important problem. We also find evidence of modest egocentric and different-trait bias.

Twin studies function as natural experiments that reveal political ideology’s substantial genetic roots, but how does that comport with research showing a largely nonideological public? This study integrates two important literatures and tests whether political sophistication – itself heritable – provides an “enriched environment” for genetic predispositions to actualize in political attitudes. Estimates from the Minnesota Twin Study show that sociopolitical conservatism is extraordinarily heritable (74%) for the most informed fifth of the public – much more so than population-level results (57%) – but with much lower heritability (29%) for the public’s bottom half. This heterogeneity is clearest in the Wilson–Patterson (W-P) index, with similar patterns for individual index items, an ideological constraint measure, and ideological identification. The results resolve tensions between two key fields by showing that political knowledge facilitates the expression of genetic predispositions in mass politics.

“Clickbait” media has long been espoused as an unfortunate consequence of the rise of digital journalism. But little is known about why readers choose to read clickbait stories. Is it merely curiosity, or might voters think such stories are more likely to provide useful information? We conduct a survey experiment in Italy, where a major political party enthusiastically embraced the esthetics of new media and encouraged their supporters to distrust legacy outlets in favor of online news. We offer respondents a monetary incentive for correct answers to manipulate the relative salience of the motivation for accurate information. This incentive increases differences in the preference for clickbait; older and less educated subjects become even more likely to opt to read a story with a clickbait headline when the incentive to produce a factually correct answer is higher. Our model suggests that a politically relevant subset of the population prefers Clickbait Media because they trust it more.