Results of an audit study conducted during the 2016 election cycle demonstrate that bias toward Latinos observed during the 2012 election has persisted. In addition to replicating previous results, we show that Arab/Muslim Americans face an even greater barrier to communicating with local election officials, but we find no evidence of bias toward blacks. An innovation of our design allows us to measure whether e-mails were opened by recipients, which we argue provides a direct test of implicit discrimination. We find evidence of implicit bias toward Arab/Muslim senders only.

Money comes from a variety of sources in American elections. It is unclear however whether voters’ knowledge about a candidate's funding portfolio influences how that candidate is evaluated. We present the results of two survey experiments in which we randomly assigned the composition of donors from various categories to a hypothetical candidate. We find that on average a candidate described as having received a majority of his contributions from individuals is evaluated more highly than one who received a majority of his contributions from interest groups. We also find that when it comes to self-financing a campaign, using private sector money is more beneficial to candidates than using inherited money, but only when the candidate is a member of the same party as the voter. Our results have implications for campaign strategy, academic debates concerning the effect of money on elections, and policy debates concerning the effects of increased campaign finance disclosure.

One of the best-known empirical findings in the political sciences is the gender difference in political knowledge: women show less political knowledge than men. Conventional research argues that this difference is mainly a product of socialization, structural factors, and biology. Our paper brings a new perspective to the explanation of the gender gap in political knowledge. Based on an online survey and an experiment1, we emphasize the relevance of gender stereotypes as a situational pressure that reduces the performance of women in a political knowledge test. Two conclusions emerge from the analysis: First, our results indicate the existence of a negative stereotype related to the political knowledge of women. Second, the activation of gender stereotypes affects performance on a political knowledge test. Consistent with previous research on stereotype threat, our results indicate that the performance of men on a political knowledge test is affected by gender stereotypes.

Cost-effective and equitable climate change mitigation requires the transfer of resources from developed to developing countries. In two behavioral experiments, we demonstrate that American subjects act according to a strong home preference, by making private donations and writing letters in support of public spending more often for mitigation programs located at home versus those overseas. We attempt to overcome the preference to act at home by randomly informing some subjects that foreign programs are more cost-effective than domestic programs. Home preference is mitigated only in the case of private donations. From a separate experimental treatment, we show that the preference against foreign programs is exacerbated when the co-benefits of mitigation programs are made salient. Importantly, home preference crosses party lines, indicating that it is a deep-seeded, affective preference. These findings highlight significant political obstacles to international cooperation on climate change that relies on transfers.

Do events irrelevant to politics, such as the weather and sporting events, affect political opinions? A growing experimental literature suggests that such events can matter. However, extant experimental evidence may over-state irrelevant event effects; this could occur if these studies happen to focus on particular scenarios where irrelevant event effects are likely to occur. One way to address this possibility is through replication, which is what we do. Specifically, we replicate an experimental study that showed the outcome of a college football game can influence presidential approval. Our results partially replicate the previous study and suggest the impact is constrained to a limited set of outcome variables. The findings accentuate the need for scholars to identify the conditions under which irrelevant effects occur. While the effects clearly can occur, there relevance to politics remains unclear.

Mechanical Turk has become an important source of subjects for social science experiments, providing a low-cost alternative to the convenience of using undergraduates while avoiding the expense of drawing fully representative samples. However, we know little about how the rates we pay to “Turkers” for participating in social science experiments affects their participation. This study examines subject performance using two experiments – a short survey experiment and a longer dynamic process tracing study of political campaigns – that recruited Turkers at different rates of pay. Looking at demographics and using measures of attention, engagement and evaluation of the candidates, we find no effects of pay rates upon subject recruitment or participation. We conclude by discussing implications and ethical standards of pay.

Despite the introduction of social restrictions designed to stem the spread of COVID-19, many Indonesians have continued to attend places of worship. This poses a major public health threat, as congregational prayer involves large numbers of worshippers gathering under conditions known to enable the spread of the virus. Using a nationally representative survey, we evaluated the efficacy of messages delivered from different authorities in encouraging Indonesians to worship at home. We find no consistent evidence that public health messages change Indonesians’ attitudes toward communal prayer or their willingness to forgo communal prayer during the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, however, looking at well-defined subpopulations – non-Muslims and supporters of the president – we find suggestive evidence that messages were effective in increasing the likelihood of individuals to indicate a willingness to forgo communal prayer in the forthcoming week. Our results suggest that public health officials should eschew blanket messaging strategies in favor of more targeted approaches.

A large literature argues that the committee assignment process plays an important role in shaping legislative politics because some committees provide legislators with substantial benefits. However, evaluating the degree to which legislators benefit from winning their preferred assignments has been challenging with existing data. This paper sheds light on the benefits legislators accrue from winning their preferred committee assignments by exploiting rules in Arkansas’ state legislature, where legislators select their own committee assignments in a randomized order. The natural experiment indicates that legislators reap at most limited rewards from winning their preferred assignments. These results potentially raise questions about the robustness of widely held assumptions in literatures on party discipline and legislative organization.

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.

We examine cooperation with the state using a series of survey experiments on policing conducted in late 2011 in Moscow, Russia, where distrust of the state is high and attempts to reform the police have been ineffective. Through various vignettes that place respondents in situations in which they are the witness or victim of a crime, we experimentally manipulate crime severity, identity of the perpetrator (whether the crime is committed by a police officer), monetary rewards, appeals to civic duty, and the opportunity cost of time spent reporting. Of these factors, crime severity and identity of the perpetrator are robustly associated with a propensity to report. Our research design and results contribute to a large literature on cooperation with the state by examining variables that may be more salient or function differently in countries with weak institutions than in developed democracies.

We assess individuals’ responses to news about threat, compared to news about positive indicators of well-being, using data from nine experiments conducted across eight countries. The general proposition is that exposure to news about threat increases tendencies to “tune in” to information, compared to those presented with news about better times. The evidence strongly supports this expectation: without exception, the average respondent recalls and seeks more information about terrorist threat than good times. Further, this pattern of results generalizes to other threats. The study thematically and geographically extends research on negative information and political learning. It also has broader implications: absorbing newsworthy information is foundational to the types of attitudes citizens express and the extent to which, and how, they engage in the world around them.

Do increasing, and increasingly diverse, immigration flows lead to declining support for redistributive policy? This concern is pervasive in the literatures on immigration, multiculturalism and redistribution, and in public debate as well. The literature is nevertheless unable to disentangle the degree to which welfare chauvinism is related to (a) immigrant status or (b) ethnic difference. This paper reports on results from a web-based experiment designed to shed light on this issue. Representative samples from the United States, Quebec, and the “Rest-of-Canada” responded to a vignette in which a hypothetical social assistance recipient was presented as some combination of immigrant or not, and Caucasian or not. Results from the randomized manipulation suggest that while ethnic difference matters to welfare attitudes, in these countries it is immigrant status that matters most. These findings are discussed in light of the politics of diversity and recognition, and the capacity of national policies to address inequalities.

Voters are more likely to support candidates whose faces and voices are perceived as competent. However, what is the simultaneous influence of these two characteristics? Here this question is examined with an observational study and an experiment. In the observational study, subjects rated the facial competence of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The most and least competent faces identified were paired with recordings of competent (i.e., lower pitched) and incompetent (i.e., higher pitched) voices to create simulated candidates. For the experiment, a separate set of subjects voted between randomly generated pairs of these simulated candidates. The results show that candidates with competent faces or competent voices won more votes, but the influence of facial competence was nearly three times that of vocal competence.

Misinformation about events surrounding the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic pose an existential threat to American democracy and public health. Public opinion surveys reveal that high percentages of Republicans indicate that they endorse some aspects of mistaken beliefs surrounding election fraud in the 2020 election. Still, understanding how to measure the endorsement of misperceptions is critical for understanding the threat at hand. Are high levels of mistaken beliefs genuinely held, or are they partially a function of expressive responding? I address this question through a set of survey experiments encouraging accuracy-oriented processing among the general public. Using well-powered surveys of Republicans and Independents, I find that treatments designed to encourage more accurate responses are ineffective in reducing the endorsement of partisan electoral and public health misperceptions and can in some cases even backfire. These findings suggest that support for these misperceptions is genuinely held.

Overcoming vaccine hesitancy is critical to containing the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. To increase vaccination rates, the State of Ohio launched a million dollar lottery in May 2021. Following a pre-registered analysis, we estimate the effects of Ohio’s lottery program Vax-a-Million on COVID-19 vaccination rates by comparing it to a “synthetic control” composed of eight other states. We find a statistically insignificant 1.3% decrease in the full vaccination rate in Ohio at the end of the lottery period. We investigate the robustness of our conclusion to model specifications through a multiverse analysis of 216 possible models, including longer time periods and alternative vaccination measures. The majority (88%) find small negative effects in line with the results of our pre-registered model. While our results are most consistent with a decrease in vaccination rate, they do not allow a firm conclusion on whether the lottery increased or decreased vaccine uptake.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) into developing countries such as India and China is often met with domestic backlash by the citizens of the host country, and backlash in the form of protests and other disruptive behavior has increased the salience of public opinion in FDI policy. As one of the first survey experiments assessing Chinese citizens’ attitudes toward FDI, this paper adopts a novel conjoint design to evaluate the impact, in the present project, of individual respondent characteristics and specific FDI features on respondents’ preferences. Importantly, we find that low-skilled respondents are not necessarily more likely to support labor-intensive FDI, a result that challenges the conventional wisdom that individuals in developing countries abundantly endowed with labor should be more likely to support low-skilled FDI. Instead, citizens are more concerned about FDI projects’ country of origin and impact on the local job market when forming their preferences.

We identify the impact of transparency in political decision-making on the quality of political representation with a difference-in-difference strategy. The quality of political representation is measured by the observed divergence of parliamentary decisions from revealed voter preferences on identical issues. We show that full transparency of votes of individual politicians does not decrease divergence from voter preferences.

Recent research has uncovered a dynamic role for emotion in political decision-making. Anger in particular has increased in importance as scholars uncover its role in motivating participation and partisanship. One method for examining these effects is to use an induction to invoke an emotion, though such techniques are often limited to the laboratory. We discuss pertinent psychological research on induction, test several methods, and make practical recommendations for political science survey research. Using a unique research design which varies the way anger is invoked, we first find significant effects using a scenario induction. We replicate these findings with an adult sample and extend the results to political inductions. We are able to offer practical advice to scholars interested in replicating the effects of angry campaign ads or better understanding the effects of anger arousal on political behavior.

A field experiment carried out by Butler and Nickerson (Butler, D. M., and Nickerson, D. W. (2011). Can learning constituency opinion affect how legislators vote? Results from a field experiment. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 6, 55–83) shows that New Mexico legislators changed their voting decisions upon receiving reports of their constituents’ preferences. The analysis of the experiment did not account for the possibility that legislators may share information, potentially resulting in spillover effects. Working within the analytic framework proposed by Bowers et al. (2013), I find evidence of spillovers, and present estimates of direct and indirect treatment effects. The total causal effect of the experimental intervention appears to be twice as large as reported originally.

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.