Scholars of International Organizations (IOs) increasingly use elite surveys to study the preferences and decisions of policymakers. When designing these surveys, one central concern is low statistical power, because respondents are typically recruited from a small and inaccessible population. However, much of what we know about how to incentivize elites to participate in surveys is based on anecdotal reflections, rather than systematic evidence on which incentives work best. In this article, we study the efficacy of three incentives in a preregistered experiment with World Bank staff. These incentives were the chance to win an Amazon voucher, a donation made to a relevant charity, and a promise to provide a detailed report on the findings. We find that no incentive outperformed the control group, and the monetary incentive decreased the number of respondents on average by one-third compared to the control group (from around 8% to around 5%).

Attempts to correct political misperceptions often fail. The dominant theoretical explanation for this failure comes from psychological research on motivated reasoning. We identify a novel source of motivated reasoning in response to corrective information: the justification of socially undesirable preferences. Further, we demonstrate that this motivation can, under certain conditions, overpower the motivation to maintain congruence. Our empirical test is a national survey experiment that asks participants to reconcile partisan motivations and the motivation to justify voting against a racial minority candidate. Consistent with our argument, racially prejudiced participants dismiss corrections when misinformation is essential to justify voting against a black candidate of their own party, but accept corrections about an otherwise identical candidate of the opposing party. These results provide new insight into the persistence of certain forms of political misinformation.

In legislative bargaining, the proposer is often able to extract a greater proportion of the surplus. However, a higher likelihood of being selected as the proposer can backfire, as it may reduce the probability that the agent is included in a winning coalition. We experimentally test the theoretical prediction of potentially negative returns to recognition probability in two-period legislative bargaining noted in Baron and Ferejohn (1989). We find that higher recognition probability benefits subjects in all treatments, except one in which we automate the second period. It is because proposers often favor the member with the greater recognition probability as a coalition partner, and such tendency varies depending on the proposer’s recognition probability, counter to the theoretical prediction. In all treatments, a vast majority of subjects exhibit a strict preference for higher recognition probability.

A consistent finding in industrialized democracies is that having a daughter shapes parents’ attitudes and behaviors in gender-egalitarian ways. We test whether this finding travels to a young middle-income democracy where women’s rights are more tenuous: South Africa. Using a dataset of over 7,500 respondents with information on family structure, we find no discernible effect on attitudes about women’s rights or on partisan identification. We speculate that our null findings relate to opportunity: daughter effects are more likely when parents perceive economic, social, and political opportunities for women. When women’s customary status and de facto opportunities are low, as in South Africa, having a daughter may have no effect on parents’ political behavior. Our results demonstrate the virtues of diversifying case selection in political behavior beyond economically wealthy democracies.

Sports victory constitutes an important part of propaganda in authoritarian states. The heavy state investment in sports industries and sports culture in China illustrates the political importance of sports. However, few studies have systematically examined the exact impact of sports propaganda on public opinion. Using a survey experiment conducted in two Chinese cities, this article finds that broadcast highlighting national sports achievements has significant positive effects on general satisfaction and compliance with the local governments. These results expand on the small, but growing, literature on the effects of sports on political opinions and help detail the specific ways in which sports can affect political attitudes.

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically altered all aspects of life, including the creation of trade-offs between the right to vote and health. While many states postponed primary elections, Wisconsin forged ahead with their April 7, 2020 primaries. The result was widely criticized, with health officials raising concerns about the spread of COVID-19 through in-person voting. We argue that concerns from Wisconsin health officials about the potential to contract COVID-19 via in-person voting can shift American’s comfort with using various voting methods in November. We test our hypotheses using a survey experiment on a diverse national sample. We find that information about possible coronavirus exposures decreases comfort with voting in-person yet does not increase comfort with voting by mail. We discuss the implications, including the need to tailor messages to specific features of various methods of voting in order to increase citizens’ comfort with voting in upcoming elections.

Research on the link between education and political ideology is likely affected by biases common in conventional observational methods. A study by Rasmussen et al. (2021) addresses this problem by examining social and economic ideology in a Danish discordant twin design, finding that education shows positive causal effects on economic, but not social, conservatism. In this paper, I provide a set of replications of these results using a dataset of genotyped Swedish twins. I complement this by using random variation within fraternal twin pairs in a polygenic index of education. Results differ markedly from the original study, but are also shown to be sensitive to precise definitions of the ideological dimensions and which sub-dimensions or items are included. Overall, more care may be warranted when empirically defining ideology. Additionally, educational effects on ideology are likely to be sensitive to particular characteristics of the educational experience across time and space.

The gender gap in political knowledge is a well-established finding in Political Science. One explanation for gender differences in political knowledge is the activation of negative stereotypes about women. As part of the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program, we conducted a two-stage preregistered and high-powered direct replication of Study 2 of Ihme and Tausendpfund (2018). While we successfully replicated the gender gap in political knowledge – such that male participants performed better than female participants – both the first (N = 671) and second stage (N = 831) of the replication of the stereotype activation effect were unsuccessful. Taken together (pooled N = 1,502), results indicate evidence of absence of the effect of stereotype activation on gender differences in political knowledge. We discuss potential explanations for these findings and put forward evidence that the gender gap in political knowledge might be an artifact of how knowledge is measured.

Do people judge some forms of wage discrimination to be more unfair than others? We report an experiment in an online labor market in which participants were paid based on discriminatory rules. We test hypotheses about fairness based on procedural justice, divisiveness, and affective polarization between partisans. Workers transcribed text and then learned that they earned more or less money than other workers for doing the same job. We manipulated whether the unequal pay was based on their political party, eye color, or an arbitrary choice between two doors. Consistent with the divisiveness hypothesis, participants judged discriminatory pay to be less fair when it was based on a stable characteristic, political party, or eye color, compared to a transient choice (between doors). We find mixed evidence about how affective polarization exacerbates the unfairness of partisan discrimination. We discuss implications for the procedural justice of wage discrimination.

Social choice theory demonstrates that majority rule is generically indeterminate. However, from an empirical perspective, large and arbitrary policy shifts are rare events in politics. The uncovered set (UCS) is the dominant preference-based explanation for the apparent empirical predictability of majority rule in multiple dimensions. Its underlying logic assumes that voters act strategically, considering the ultimate consequences of their actions. I argue that all empirical applications of the UCS rest on an incomplete behavioral model assuming purely egoistically motivated individuals. Beyond material self-interest, prosocial motivations offer an additional factor to explain the outcomes of majority rule. I test my claim in a series of committee decision-making experiments in which I systematically vary the fairness properties of the policy space while keeping the location of the UCS constant. The experimental results overwhelmingly support the prosociality explanation.

Corruption is widespread in many developing countries, though public officials’ discretion in the solicitation of bribes may expose some citizens to more corruption than others. We derive expectations about how shared ethnicity between government officials and citizens should influence the likelihood of bribe solicitation. We evaluate these expectations through a field experiment in which Malawian confederates seek electricity connections from real government offices – an interaction that is often accompanied by bribe solicitation. Our field experiment exogenously varied coethnicity between the official and the confederate. We find that coethnicity increases the likelihood of expediting an electricity connection, both with and without a bribe, which we interpret as evidence of parochial corruption.

Researchers are interested in running experiments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which often include financially incentivized measures of risk preferences. However, it can be that gambling is forbidden and these measures may either be illegal or result in non-random refusal of subjects to participate. If individuals derive utility from warm glow or otherwise enjoy giving, then risk preferences apply to that utility too. Even in the absence of personal stakes, if risk will be borne by others, warm glow will lead subjects to behave in a manner consistent with their preferences over risk for private consumption. I examine how paid risk elicitation mechanisms correlate with measures incentivized by charitable contributions. Results suggest that subjects behave almost identically under paid and charitable stakes. Charitable measures may provide behavioral means by which to measure risk preferences, in populations where gambling is forbidden.

Recent scholarship in political science identifies emotions as an important antecedent to political behavior. Existing work, however, has focused much more on the political effects of emotions than on their causes. Here, we begin to examine how personality moderates emotional responses to political events. We hypothesized that the personality trait need for affect (NFA) would moderate the emotions evoked by disturbing political news. Drawing data from a survey experiment conducted on a national sample, we find that individuals high in NFA have an especially vivid emotional response to disturbing news—a moderating relationship that has the potential to surpass those associated with symbolic attachments.

In this paper, we provide an empirical test for the theoretical claim that ambiguous nuclear threats create a “commitment trap” for American leaders: when deterrence fails, supposedly they are more likely to order the use of nuclear weapons to avoid domestic audience costs for backing down. We designed an original survey experiment and fielded it to a sample of 1,000 U.S. citizens. We found no evidence of a commitment trap when ambiguous nuclear threats are made. Unlike explicit threats, ambiguous ones did not generate domestic disapproval when the leader backed down; the decision to employ nuclear weapons led to more public backlash for the leader than being caught bluffing; and the threats did not influence public preference for nuclear use across our scenarios. Our findings contribute to the scholarly literature on nuclear crisis bargaining and policy debates over the future of US declaratory policy.

In many situations, incentives exist to acquire knowledge and make correct political decisions. We conduct an experiment that contributes to a small but growing literature on incentives and political knowledge, testing the effect of certain and uncertain incentives on knowledge. Our experiment builds on the basic theoretical point that acquiring and using information is costly, and incentives for accurate answers will lead respondents to expend greater effort on the task and be more likely to answer knowledge questions correctly. We test the effect of certain and uncertain incentives and find that both increase effort and accuracy relative to the control condition of no incentives for accuracy. Holding constant the expected benefit of knowledge, we do not observe behavioral differences associated with the probability of earning an incentive for knowledge accuracy. These results suggest that measures of subject performance in knowledge tasks are contingent on the incentives they face. Therefore, to ensure the validity of experimental tasks and the related behavioral measures, we need to ensure a correspondence between the context we are trying to learn about and our experimental design.

To successfully address large-scale public health threats such as the novel coronavirus outbreak, policymakers need to limit feelings of fear that threaten social order and political stability. We study how policy responses to an infectious disease affect mass fear using data from a survey experiment conducted on a representative sample of the adult population in the USA (N = 5,461). We find that fear is affected strongly by the final policy outcome, mildly by the severity of the initial outbreak, and minimally by policy response type and rapidity. These results hold across alternative measures of fear and various subgroups of individuals regardless of their level of exposure to coronavirus, knowledge of the virus, and several other theoretically relevant characteristics. Remarkably, despite accumulating evidence of intense partisan conflict over pandemic-related attitudes and behaviors, we show that effective government policy reduces fear among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike.

How do the costs of conflict influence public support for the use of force? Existing research finds that weapons that eliminate the possibility of military casualties, such as drones, increase popular support for engaging in conflict. We argue that this effect may be overstated because the choice of weapons technology is endogenous to conflict. Leaders may select to use drones in conflicts where the risk of harm to ground forces is especially high. To address this, we replicate and extend the research design of Walsh and Schulzke across three survey experiments. The key innovation in our experiments is that subjects are led to believe that the choice of attack type – drones or ground troops – is determined by weather conditions rather than strategic considerations. We find that support for military action does not differ across treatments in which subjects are told that the attack involves drone strikes or ground troops.

As the number of people of color (PoC) grows in the United States, a key question is how partisanship will develop among this important electoral group. Yet many open questions remain about PoC partisanship, due to limited availability of panel data, a lack of sensitive instrumentation, and small samples of PoC in most public opinion surveys. This brief report leverages a unique panel of African American (N = 650) and Latino (N = 650) eligible voters, before and after the 2020 Presidential Election between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump. Using measures that tap expressive partisan, racial, and national identity attachments, we find that Biden’s electoral victory significantly intensified partisan identity among his Democratic PoC supporters, relative to PoC who were not Democrats and supported Trump. We do not find significant changes in racial or national identities. Our results advance research on PoC’s partisanship.

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.

The deadly outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has accompanied a worldwide surge in anti-Asian hate crimes and racial violence. In this paper, I experimentally assess the downstream effects of the health crisis on the racial attitudes of the American public. Survey respondents were randomly assigned to different messages about COVID-19 and its association with China and answered a battery of racial attitude questions, including a new measure of anti-Asian racial resentment. Across all outcome measures, I find null effects for both treatment messages, which suggests that racialized views toward Asians may be stable individual-level dispositions that have shaped American responses to the pandemic. Findings from this study have important implications for research on the far-reaching societal and political consequences of the pandemic in the United States and beyond.