Following the 2016 U.S. election, researchers and policymakers have become intensely concerned about the dissemination of “fake news,” or false news stories in circulation (Lazer et al., 2017). Research indicates that fake news is shared widely and has a pro-Republican tilt (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017). Facebook now flags dubious stories as disputed and tries to block fake news publishers (Mosseri, 2016). While the typical misstatements of politicians can be corrected (Nyhan et al., 2017), the sheer depth of fake news’s conspiracizing may preclude correction. Can fake news be corrected?

The Standards Committee of the Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association has produced reporting guidelines that aim to increase the clarity of experimental research reports. This paper describes the Committee's rationale for the guidelines it developed and includes our Recommended Reporting Standards for Experiments (Laboratory, Field, Survey). It begins with a content analysis of current reporting practices in published experimental research. Although researchers report most important aspects of their experimental designs and data, we find substantial omissions that could undermine the clarity of research practices and the ability of researchers to assess the validity of study conclusions. With the need for reporting guidelines established, the report describes the process the Committee used to develop the guidelines, the feedback received during the comment period, and the rationale for the final version of the guidelines.

This paper discusses how audit studies can be adapted to test the effectiveness of interventions aimed at reducing discrimination. We conducted an adapted audit experiment to test whether making officials aware of bias could reduce levels of racial bias. While the limitations of our design make it difficult to assess where information alone can reduce bias, our study makes two important contributions. First, we replicate prior studies by showing that white, local elected officials are less responsive to black constituents. That local officials exhibit biased behavior is particularly worrisome, as local government is often the level that most directly affects citizens’ daily lives. Second, we provide several suggestions for future audit studies that draw from the strengths and weaknesses of our own design. We hope that they will help improve future work on identifying and reducing discrimination.

As the U.S. Government works to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, messaging is important in getting individuals to comply with public health recommendations, especially as the response from the public seems to be polarized along partisan and ideological lines. Using a recent Centers for Disease Control recommendation of wearing facemasks, I use Regulatory Focus Theory to predict that conservatives will be more responsive to messages related to promotion, while liberals are more responsive to messages related to prevention. Using a pre-registered experimental design, I find no evidence that prevention messages influence attitudes toward mask wearing. Promotion messages, however, cause conservatives to become less supportive of mask wearing, in contrast to theoretical predictions. These findings suggest that, related to messaging about mask wearing, strong ideological differences do not emerge related to the focus of the message.

Inter-ethnic residential segregation is correlated with intergroup bias and conflict, poorly functioning states and civil societies, weak economic development, and ethnocentric political behavior. As such, segregation has been a subject of long-standing interest. However, segregation has not been assigned in randomized controlled trials, so the observed correlations may be spurious and the mechanism behind these correlations is poorly understood. In two experiments, we randomly assign segregation in a laboratory and demonstrate that segregation affects perceptions of other people and causes intergroup bias in costly decision-making. Rather than segregation merely inhibiting intergroup contact, we demonstrate that segregation directly affects perception and thus can affect intergroup relations even when holding contact constant.

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.

How do citizens attribute blame in the wake of government failure? Does partisanship bias these attributions? While partisan cues may serve as useful guides when citizens are evaluating public policies, those cues are likely to be less informative and more distortionary when evaluating government performance regarding a crisis. We address these questions by examining blame attributions to government appointees for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We implement an experimental design in a nationally representative survey that builds on previous work in two ways: (1) we manipulate party labels for the same officials in a real-world setting by considering appointees who were nominated at different times by presidents of different parties; and (2) we examine how domain relevance moderates partisan bias. We find that partisan bias in attributions is strongest when officials are domain relevant, a finding that has troubling implications for representative democracy.

Do men and women respond to various party recruitment messages similarly? Working with the Utah County Republican Party, we designed a field experiment in which we invited over 11,600 male and female party activists to attend a free, party-sponsored “Prospective Candidate Information Seminar” by randomizing different invitation messages. We found that women were half as likely as men to respond to recruitment—log on to the seminar website for more information, register for the seminar, and attend the seminar. While we found some suggestive evidence about what recruitment messages may particularly motivate women or men vis-à-vis a control message, our findings are inconclusive because of a low response rate. This first attempt to experimentally test gendered reactions to recruitment in a sample of active party supporters provides a valuable baseline for future research.

Incumbents often seek to wield power in ways that are formally legal but informally proscribed. Why do voters endorse these power grabs? Prior literature focuses on polarization. We propose instead that many voters are majoritarian, in that they view popularly elected leaders’ actions as inherently democratic – even when those actions undermine liberal democracy. We find support for this claim in two original survey experiments, arguing that majoritarians’ desire to give wide latitude to elected officials is an important but understudied threat to liberal democracy in the United States.

Current approaches to humanizing members of an outgroup in contexts marked by protracted intergroup conflict see mixed success. In both Study 1, conducted on a random sample of Israeli Jews (N = 103), and Study 2, conducted on a nationally diverse sample of Israeli Jews (N = 670), we experimentally test the effect of a unique approach to humanizing the outgroup based on empathy. Instead of requiring individuals to express empathy for outgroup suffering they might have caused, this approach requires an expression of empathy for suffering unrelated to the conflict between the groups. Results suggest that such an expression of empathy from one group member toward the other group can lead to “reciprocal empathy” which facilitates a greater willingness to accept the humanity of all members of the other group.

Majorities of citizens in high-income countries often oppose foreign aid spending. One popular explanation is that the public overestimates the percentage and amount of taxpayer funds that goes toward overseas aid. Does expressing aid flows in dollar and/or percentage terms shift public opinion toward aid? We report the results of an experiment examining differences in support for aid spending as a function of the information American and British respondents receive about foreign aid spending. In both nations, providing respondents with information about foreign aid spending as a percentage of the national budget significantly reduces support for cuts. The findings suggest that support for aid can be increased, but significant opposition to aid spending remains.

An enduring question for the social sciences is whether increasing contact and exposure between in-groups and out-groups enhances prospects for social tolerance and cooperation. Using dictator experiments with ethnic Serbs in post-war Kosovo, our research explores how norms of altruism are impacted by proximity to former rivals. In the aftermath of violence, proximity appears to amplify solidarity with the in-group but also increases empathy toward former adversaries. Based on a March 2011 study of 158 ethnic Serbs from regions across Kosovo with varying degrees of contact and separation from ethnic Albanians, we find that both out-group bridging and in-group bonding norms increase with exposure to the out-group. The inclusion of extended controls and matching for displacement by violence and other forms of victimization helps alleviate concerns about sorting and selection driving our results.

Past research shows that growing inequality often does not result in citizen demands for redistribution. We examine one mechanism that could explain why people do not protest growing inequality: a particular sub-prediction of system justification theory (SJT). SJT argues that humans have a psychological need to justify their social system. The specific sub-prediction of SJT tested here is the idea that inequality itself increases system justification. This could yield a negative feedback loop in which political responses to inequality grows ever less likely as inequality grows more extreme. Previous research on this hypothesis relied on cross-sectional survey data and provided mixed results. We take an experimental approach and ask whether exposure to economic inequality makes people more likely to defend the system. In one main study and two replications with varying samples, experimental treatments, and outcome measures, we find no evidence that information about economic inequality increases system justification motivation.

A growing body of research explores the factors that affect when corrupt politicians are held accountable by voters. Most studies, however, focus on one or few factors in isolation, leaving incomplete our understanding of whether they condition each other. To address this, we embedded rich conjoint candidate choice experiments into surveys in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. We test the importance of two contextual factors thought to mitigate voters’ punishment of corrupt politicians: how widespread corruption is and whether it brings side benefits. Like other scholars, we find that corruption decreases candidate support substantially. But, we also find that information that corruption is widespread does not lessen the sanction applied against corruption, whereas information about the side benefits from corruption does, and does so to a similar degree as the mitigating role of permissible attitudes toward bribery. Moreover, those who stand to gain from these side benefits are less likely to sanction corruption.

Irregularities plague elections in developing democracies. The international community spends hundreds of millions of dollars on election observation, with little robust evidence that it consistently improves electoral integrity. We conducted a randomized control trial to measure the effect of an intervention to detect and deter electoral irregularities employing a nation-wide sample of polling stations in Uganda using scalable information and communications technology (ICT). In treatment stations, researchers delivered letters to polling officials stating that tallies would be photographed using smartphones and compared against official results. Compared to stations with no letters, the letters increased the frequency of posted tallies by polling center managers in compliance with the law; decreased the number of sequential digits found on tallies – a fraud indicator; and decreased the vote share for the incumbent president in some specifications. Our results demonstrate that a cost-effective citizen and ICT intervention can improve electoral integrity in emerging democracies.

When do citizens take action to benefit the public good, even when individual benefits are scant or non-existent? We address this question with a focus on an area of critical importance when it comes to environmental sustainability—specifically, we examine citizens' actions in the domain of energy conservation. We do so by using a survey experiment to evaluate the impact of exposure to communications posited to shape collective action behavior. We find that communications shape behavior depending on two primary factors not previously studied in concert: to whom responsibility is attributed for collective outcomes; and, what effects, or consequences, are associated with one's actions. We find that communications emphasizing individual responsibility and collective environmental benefits can stimulate collective action.

Research has explored the impact of politicians holding second jobs, or moonlighting, on their performance and recruitment, but less is known about how citizens respond to such behavior. Citizens may react negatively to Members of Parliament (MPs) moonlighting, viewing outside earnings as a conflict of interest or a distraction, or instead they might view MPs with second incomes positively, seeing them as a connection with the “real world” beyond politics. Utilizing a series of survey experiments, we assess how British citizens respond to MPs moonlighting. We demonstrate preferences more complex than those revealed by traditional survey instruments. Citizens respond to both size and source of income. They do not respond negatively to all second incomes; they are more sympathetic to the entrepreneur who continues to draw an income than medical doctors or lawyers who continue to practice. They are most hostile to politicians who take on part-time company directorships.

Conspiracy theories are prevalent among the public. Governments frequently release official documents attempting to explain events that inspire these beliefs. However, these documents are often heavily redacted, a practice that lay epistemic theory suggests might be interpreted as evidence for a conspiracy. To investigate this possibility, we tested the effect of redactions on beliefs in a well-known conspiracy theory. Results from two preregistered experiments indicate that conspiracy beliefs were higher when people were exposed to seemingly redacted documents compared to when they were exposed to unredacted documents that were otherwise identical. In addition, unredacted documents consistently lowered conspiracy beliefs relative to controls while redacted documents had reduced or null effects, suggesting that lay epistemic interpretations of the redactions undermined the effect of information in the documents. Our findings, which do not vary by conspiracy predispositions, suggest policymakers should be more transparent when releasing documents to refute misinformation.

How does a candidate’s religion affect voting behavior in societies without politically salient interdenominational cleavages? Communicating one’s faith should win votes among fellow believers, but in the absence of intergroup competition, it should not directly affect the vote of out-group members. Yet a candidate’s religion can also influence out-group voting behavior via stereotypes that are politically salient. This article uses a survey experiment, conducted prior to Chile’s 2013 election, to examine how priming evangelicals’ historical support for the government of General Augusto Pinochet affects vote intention for an evangelical candidate for Congress. Identifying a candidate as evangelical boosts vote intention among evangelical respondents but does not directly affect members of the out-group. Among right-wing non-evangelicals, the Pinochet prime increases vote intention for an evangelical candidate, but it has no effect for center-left voters. These results suggest that pinochetismo remains salient for a new generation of right-wing voters in Chile.

While most research on electoral monitors has focused on the effect of electoral monitors on politicians and their behavior in terms of committing electoral fraud, this study examines the effect of electoral monitors on citizens, and their effect, in particular, on people's perceptions of electoral integrity and behavior in terms of turnout at the polls. To examine this relationship, I conducted a field experiment around the 2009/2010 municipal elections in Kosova, which varied the amount of information people had about the responsibilities of monitors in these elections. In the experiment, people who had more information about the monitors' responsibilities believed that the elections were more free and fair than those who had less information, and also believed that the monitors helped make these elections more free and fair, even though they were not more likely to vote as a result.