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.

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.

Misinformation is widely seen as a threat to democracy that should be promptly addressed by scholars, journalists, and policymakers. However, some of the debated solutions are either controversial (internet platform regulation) or may be difficult and costly to implement in many settings (fact-checking corrections). This study investigates the effectiveness of preemptive interventions, a type of solution that has received considerably less attention in this debate. Studies show that interventions through awareness and media literacy campaigns can inoculate citizens against misinformation, but these interventions are restricted to a few contexts and settings. Our paper uses two field experiments, one of which was conducted in partnership with Brazil’s main newspaper, to investigate the effectiveness of multidimensional interventions against misinformation in São Paulo. The findings show that preemptive interventions can indeed reduce rumor acceptance and provide insights into the strategies to combat misinformation in democracies.

It is widely thought that lobbyists exert influence over legislators’ policy positions and, as a result, over policy outcomes. One mechanism of influence is the provision of policy expertise. Yet, there is little credible empirical evidence that lobbyists’ expertise influences legislative outcomes. Across four experiments fielded with three lobbyists in two state legislatures that examine two public measures of legislators’ positions, we find no evidence that lobbyists’ expertise influences legislators’ policy positions. We do find, in contrast, that the same policy expertise treatment is influential when provided by a legislative staffer. We conclude that policy information can influence legislators’ positions, but that legislators are cautious when that information is provided by lobbyists.

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.

This paper examines the extent to which social pressures can foster greater responsiveness among public officials. I conduct a non-deceptive field experiment on 1400 city executives across all 50 states and measure their level of responsiveness to open records requests. I use two messages to prime social pressure. The first treatment centers on the norm and duty to be responsive to the public’s request for transparency. The second treatment is grounded in the peer effect literature, which suggests that individuals change their behavior in the face of potential social sanctioning and accountability. I find no evidence that mayors are affected by priming the officials’ duty to the public. The mayors who received the peer effects prime were 6–8 percentage points less likely to respond, which suggests a “backfire effect.” This paper contributes to the growing responsiveness literature on the local level and the potential detrimental impact of priming peer effects.

This paper employs survey experiments to examine how contextualizing the claims made in negative political advertising affects perceptions of their fairness. This has implications for the components of fairness judgments, e.g., if “truth” is a component of fairness, being informed that a claim is untrue should undermine perceptions of its fairness, as well as for the efficacy of “fact-checking.” Our experiments on a random national telephone sample show some effects of being informed that a claim is untrue but few if it is characterized as taken out of context or as irrelevant. These findings imply that: (a) while evaluations of the truth of claims appear to be a component of fairness, considerations such as whether claims are the “whole story” or “relevant” to the decision at hand do not, and (b) contextualizing of the claims of ads in fact-checks has very little impact on perceptions of their fairness.

Attitudes toward social out-groups can be improved through “analogic perspective-taking,” whereby respondents are encouraged to use an analogy to take the perspective of the group. It is unclear, however, whether analogic perspective-taking can improve attitudes toward political organizations; how perspective-taking fares compared to the provision of narrative alone; and the limits of the attitude changes it creates. We report results from an experiment that tested analogic perspective-taking exercises about members of teachers’ unions. While perspective-taking improves attitudes toward unions, union members, and willingness to pay more in education taxes, it also increases support for some antiunion policies. A second study suggests that the bidirectional policy effects are attributable to subjects’ difficulty distinguishing pro- from antiunion policies. Analogic perspective-taking can improve attitudes toward social and political groups. But narrative exchange is not always superior to narrative provision, and both approaches may yield mixed effects on policy attitudes.

This paper investigates the impact of communication in a public good game with a central authority. The central authority includes a fixed cost that increases with the level of monitoring which in turn determines the level of deterrence. The level of monitoring is both exogenously and endogenously determined. Across three treatments subjects either have no opportunity to communicate, communicate only when the level of monitoring is exogenously imposed, or communicate only when the level of monitoring is endogenously selected. Results suggest that, in both treatments, average earnings are significantly higher with the opportunity to communicate. Most significantly, with the opportunity to communicate prior to endogenous selection, groups practically eliminate monitoring (imposing a low cost, non-deterrent, central authority), while maintaining a high level of contributions. Communication appears to make groups less dependent on institutional deterrence and allows them to reduce the costs of central authority.

Though avoiding blame is often a goal of elected officials, there are relatively few empirical examinations of how citizens assign blame during controversies. We are particularly interested in how this process works when an executive has been caught in a lie. Using two survey experiments, we examine whether subordinates can shield executives when they act as the face of a crisis. We first leverage a real-life situation involving the family separation crisis at the US–Mexico border in 2018. Respondents who read that Donald Trump falsely claimed he could not end the practice of family separation disapprove of his dishonesty. Yet this cost disappears when Trump’s then-Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, is the primary official discussed in news stories. We then replicate these findings in a fictional scenario involving a city mayor, showing that the mayor is partially shielded from negative appraisals when the city manager lies on his behalf.

Experiments on the responsiveness of elected officials highlight the tension between the freedom to carry out research and the right of subjects to be treated with respect. Controversy emerges from the power of politicians to block or object to experimental designs using identity deception. One way to resolve this conundrum is to consult citizens who, as constituents of politicians, have an interest in promoting the accountability of elected representatives. Building on the work of Desposato and Naurin and Öhberg, this survey experiment presented research designs to UK citizens for their evaluation. The findings show that citizens strongly approve of experimental research on Members of Parliament (MPs) and are glad to see their representatives participate. There are no differences in support whether designs use identity deception, debriefing, confederates or pre-agreement from MPs. Linked to high interest in politics, more citizens are glad their MPs participate in studies using identity deception than those deploying confederates.

We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether public discussion before a majority vote increases the saliency of minority interests and results in more egalitarian outcomes or whether voters use discussion to form majorities that benefit at the expense of minorities. When there are two alternatives, we find that public discussion increases the likelihood that individuals vote for equal allocations, but has little to no impact on the group outcomes. When participants choose among one equal and several unequal options, the multitude of unequal options creates a coordination problem, and we find that discussion decreases the frequency of egalitarian decisions. Our findings suggest that the effect of public communication on the fairness of majority voting outcomes depends on the strategic environment.

These are exciting times for experimental political science. The community of experimental researchers is growing quickly, and these scholars are applying increasingly sophisticated techniques to the study of an ever-widening range of substantive problems. I'm excited, and feel honored, to have been chosen as the new editor of JEPS during this phase of the field's evolution.

One European policy response to the so-called migration crisis is an accelerated implementation of information campaigns in potential origin countries. Whether and how these campaigns can influence decisions about irregular migration, however, remains under explored. I argue that information campaigns reduce intentions to migrate irregularly and expect the effects to be more substantial when anxiety-inducing messages are used. Based on a field experimental randomized control trial study (N = 1,500) of an actual European information campaign in Nigeria, I provide supportive evidence for this expectation: the information campaign reduced respondents’ intentions to migrate irregularly with a more decisive effect when using an anxiety-triggering campaign message.

This study examines whether politicians exhibit gender bias in responsiveness to constituents’ requests for public service delivery improvements in Uganda. We leverage an in-person survey experiment conducted with 333 subnational politicians, of which one-third are elected to women’s reserved seats. Politicians hear two constituents request improvements in staff absenteeism in their local school and health clinic and must decide how to allocate a fixed (hypothetical) budget between the two improvements. The voices of the citizens are randomly assigned to be (1) male-school, female-health or (2) female-school, male-health. We find no evidence of gender bias toward men versus women, or toward same-gender constituents. This study expands on the mixed results of prior studies examining gender bias in politician responsiveness (typically over email) by adding a critical new case: a low-income context with women’s reserved seats.

Does the process used to pass a law affect the way citizens evaluate the outcome? In a series of experiments, I manipulate the way in which a law is passed – ballot initiative or the legislative process – to test the effect of process on citizens’ evaluations of policy outcomes. The results show that people view the ballot initiative process as fairer than the legislative process, but that process has a negligible effect on outcome evaluations.

For decades, scholars have discussed how to build greater citizen trust in government. I hypothesize that to increase trust in government, we should consider whether decisions made in bureaucrat–citizen encounters (e.g. applications for welfare benefits) are favorable to citizens. Building on insights from social psychology, I argue that in cases where citizens are presented with unfavorable decisions (e.g. rejection of applications), public employees can mitigate the negative impact on trust in government by appearing warm and friendly in the decision-making process. The argument is tested in a large-scale randomized survey experiment on a representative sample of Danish citizens, where I manipulate decision favorability and warmth. The findings reveal that outcome favorability and warmth strongly influence citizens’ trust in government.

The 2020 presidential election brought expanded vote-by-mail opportunities, a rise in attacks on this process’s integrity, and the implementation of novel programs such as California’s Where’s My Ballot? system to ensure confidence in mail balloting. Can heightening awareness of this ballot-tracking system and other election protections alleviate fraud concerns and raise turnout? We assess whether messages reinforcing election integrity increased participation in the 2020 election through a large-scale voter mobilization field experiment. California registrants were mailed a letter that described either existing safeguards to prevent vote-by-mail fraud or the ability to track one’s ballot and ensure that it was counted. Analysis of state voter records reveals that neither message increased turnout over a simple election reminder or even no contact, even among subgroups where larger effects might be expected. In the context of a high-profile, high-turnout presidential election, assurances about ballot and electoral integrity did not increase turnout.

We are excited and honored to be the editorial team for JEPS. We are indebted to Eric Dickson for his efforts as the journal's previous editor. He set a high bar for JEPS as an outlet for high quality experimental research. Lucky for us, the healthy state of experimental research means that we will continue to have a deep pool of well-crafted and important work. We also thank Nick Haas, who deftly guided us through the transition as Editorial Assistant. Without his help, it would have been a near impossible task to get up to speed.