Politically relevant numbers often have very limited effects on the policy attitudes of ordinary citizens, which make the widespread use of numbers by politicians somewhat puzzling. This paper argues that politicians’ numerical rhetoric may function as a voter heuristic and that the use of numbers by politicians therefore has a positive impact on voters’ perceptions of these politicians. A survey experiment confirms that even when numbers do little to move voters’ policy positions, numbers do have the effect of making politicians appear more competent. As a consequence, numerical rhetoric can in some cases increase electoral support for a politician.

Several scholars have argued that abundant natural resources can be harmful to economic performance under bad institutions and helpful when institutions are good. These arguments have either been theoretical or based on naturally occurring variation in natural resource wealth. We test this theory by using a laboratory experiment to reap the benefits of randomized control. We conduct this experiment in a virtual world (Second Life™) to make institutions more visceral. We find support for the theory.

Hypocrisy is a common feature of political scandal. Yet, it is unclear how individuals evaluate hypocritical misconduct differently based on a transgressing politician’s partisan identity. Using survey experiments, this article assesses how exposure to different frames of wrong doing involving actual members of congress spill over on to the evaluation of parties distinctly among co-partisans and out-partisans. I find that Republicans feel more positive towards their party after reading about the resignation of a hypocritical co-partisan politician compared to merely reading about the politician’s hypocrisy. In addition, Republicans feel warmer about their party when reading about a hypocritical versus non-hypocritical out-party transgression. However, Democrats do not change their party evaluations after being exposed to different scandal frames involving co-partisan and out-partisan politicians. This suggests that Republicans and Democrats have different attitudes towards hypocrisy and/or differently apply information about individuals when evaluating parties.

This paper considers the implications of construal level theory in the context of survey experiments probing foreign policy opinion formation. Psychology research demonstrates that people discount the long-term consequences of decisions, thinking about distal or hypothetical events more abstractly than immediate scenarios. I argue that this tendency introduces a bias into survey experiments on foreign policy opinion. Respondents reasoning about an impending military engagement are likelier to consider its costs than are those reasoning in the abstract hypothetical environment. I provide evidence of this bias by replicating a common audience costs experimental design and introducing a prompt to consider casualties. I find that priming respondents to articulate their expectations about casualties in a foreign intervention reduces support and dampens the experimental effect, thereby cutting the estimated absolute audience cost substantially. This result suggests a gap between how survey respondents approach hypothetical and real situations of military intervention.

Past research shows that ethnic diversity reduces the ability to sanction norm violators, ultimately undermining cooperation. We test this directly by experimentally varying the ethnic composition of groups playing a dictator game with third-party punishment among two ethnic groups along the Kenya–Tanzania border. We also implement a structurally identical game where the endowment division is randomly determined in order to isolate a punishment motivation from the motivation to rectify income inequality. While costly income adjustment in both games is driven primarily by norm violations and inequality aversion, the ethnic composition of groups also influences sharing and sanctioning behavior in Kenya but not Tanzania, consistent with documented differences in the strength of nationalism across the two countries. However, the way in which shared ethnicity affects sanctioning in Kenya—namely, increased punishment of out-group violations against in-group members—is at odds with theories that anticipate that costly sanctioning will primarily target coethnics.

Previous literature suggests that economic performance affects government approval asymmetrically, either because voters are quicker to blame incompetence than to credit ability (grievance asymmetry) or because they understand that the degree to which policy-makers can affect the economy varies depending on economic openness (clarity of responsibility asymmetry). We seek to understand whether these asymmetries coexist, arguing that these theories conjointly imply that globalization may have the capacity to mitigate blame for bad outcomes but should neither promote nor reduce credit to policy-makers for good economic outcomes. We look for evidence of these asymmetries in three survey experiments carried out in the USA and Canada in 2014 and 2015. We find ample experimental evidence in support of the grievance asymmetry, but our results are mixed on the impact of economic openness on blame mitigation, with some evidence of this phenomenon in the USA, but not in Canada.

Recent studies of efforts to increase citizen engagement in local governance through information campaigns report mixed results. We consider whether low levels of self-efficacy beliefs limit engagement, especially among poor citizens in poor countries. Citizens may be caught in an “efficacy trap” which limits their realization of better public goods provision. We describe results from a series of experimental studies conducted with over 2,200 citizens in rural Tanzania, in which we compare the effects of standard information campaigns with Validated Participation (VP), an intervention designed to socially validate citizens’ participation. We implement a staged approach to experimental research, seeking to balance ethical and cost concerns about field experimentation. In our main analyses, we find that VP did not lead to increased levels of self-efficacy or more active citizen behaviors relative to standard informational treatments. Nonetheless, we find some promising evidence for VP in a follow-up qualitative study with teachers. We conclude by discussing lessons from this research and directions for future investigation of the possible role of self-efficacy traps in development.

Using a political-frame-free, lab-in-the-field experiment, we investigate the associations between employment status, self-reported political ideology, and preferences for redistribution. The experiment consists of a real-effort task, followed by a four-player dictator game. In one treatment, dictator game initial endowments depend on participants’ performance in the real-effort task, i.e., they are earned, in the other, they are randomly determined. We find that being employed or unemployed is associated with revealed redistributive preferences, while the political ideology of the employed and unemployed is not. In contrast, the revealed redistributive preferences of students are strongly associated with their political ideologies. The employed and right-leaning students redistribute earnings less than windfalls, the unemployed, and left-leaning students make no such distinction.

How does single-party dominance influence interpersonal trust? We draw on evidence from trust games played by more than 2,000 subjects in South Africa, where, since Apartheid, race-based social enmity has persisted under democratic competition characterized by single-party dominance. We find that partisan-based trust discrimination is most pronounced for those who identify with the main opposition party and is driven by strong distrust of rival partisans. These findings underscore how electoral competition, in general, shapes trust across party lines and suggests one-sided competition, in particular, has asymmetrical effects between parties in dominant party systems. Moreover, this study provides additional evidence regarding the relative weights of trustworthiness stereotypes tied to partisanship and race.

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.

Can politicians use targeted messages to offset position taking that would otherwise reduce their public support? We examine the effect of a politician’s justification for their tax policy stance on public opinion and identify limits on the ability of justifications to generate leeway for incongruent position taking on this issue. We draw on political communication research to establish expectations about the heterogeneous effects of justifications that employ either evidence or values based on whether or not constituents agree with the position a politician takes. In two survey experiments, we find small changes in support in response to these types of messages among targeted groups, but rule out large benefits for politicians to selectively target policy justifications toward subsets of the public. We also highlight a potential cost to selective messaging by showing that when these targeted messages reach unintended audiences they can backfire and reduce a candidate’s support.

We investigate in an economic experiment how people choose sides in disputes. In an eight-player side-taking game, two disputants at a time fight over an indivisible resource and other group members choose sides. The player with more supporters wins the resource, which is worth real money. Conflicts occur spontaneously between any two individuals in the group. Players choose sides by ranking their loyalties to everyone else in the group, and they automatically support the disputant they ranked higher. We manipulate participants’ information about other players’ loyalties and also their ability to communicate with public chat messages. We find that participants spontaneously and quickly formed alliances, and more information about loyalties caused more alliance-building. Without communication, we observe little evidence of bandwagon or egalitarian strategies, but with communication, some groups invented rank rotation schemes to equalize payoffs while choosing the same side to avoid fighting costs.

Manipulations checks are postexperimental measures widely used to verify that subjects understood the treatment. Some researchers drop subjects who failed manipulation checks in order to limit the analyses to attentive subjects. This short report offers a novel illustration on how this practice may bias experimental results: in the present case, through confirming a hypothesis that is likely false. In a survey experiment, subjects were primed with a fictional news story depicting an economic decline versus prosperity. Subjects were then asked whether the news story depicted an economic decline or prosperity. Results indicate that responses to this manipulation check captured subjects’ preexisting beliefs about the economic situation. As a consequence, dropping subjects who failed the manipulation check mixes the effects of preexisting and induced beliefs, increasing the risk of false positive findings. Researchers should avoid dropping subjects based on posttreatment measures and rely on pretreatment measures of attentiveness.

What makes people take ethnic divisions into account when judging politics? We consider here the possible effect of language. We hypothesize that speaking a minority tongue primes ethnic divisions, leading people to interpret politics more heavily through this prism. In two survey experiments with bilingual adults, we demonstrate that subjects assigned to interview in a minority language are indeed more likely to evaluate politics based on ethnic considerations: they rank ethnic relations as a more important political issue and they are more likely to correctly identify the anti-minority party in their political system. These results suggest that people may think about politics differently depending on the language they use.

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.

Shared social disadvantage relative to Whites is assumed to motivate inter-minority political behavior but we lack causal evidence. Using a survey experiment of 1,200 African Americans, we prompt respondents to consider group social position when evaluating political commonality with Latinos. The experiment describes racial disparities in a randomized domain (education or housing), varies the description of inequality (either Black versus White, Latino versus White, or Black and Latino versus White), and offers half of the respondents a political cue to test whether shared social disadvantage causes Blacks’ perceptions of political commonality with Latinos. We find little evidence of a causal relationship. We conclude that cross-racial minority political coalitions may be more difficult to activate than previously thought.

The number of multiracial candidates seeking office is growing in an increasingly diverse America. This raises questions about how the media frame candidates with potentially complex racial backgrounds and how voters respond to these frames. We investigate the impact of media frames that emphasize race and gender attributes using survey experiments on Kamala Harris—the first Black woman and first Asian woman vice president. Our findings are mixed. In a survey experiment conducted after her nomination, headlines emphasizing different elements of Harris’s race or gender had no impact on public attitudes. In an experiment conducted after Harris was inaugurated, however, headlines that cued her gender only or both her gender and her Black racial background boosted popular support. Taken together, these findings suggest that some types of identity-based cues may matter, but the effects are sensitive to experimental settings and contexts.

Immigration is highly salient for voters in Europe and the USA and has generated considerable academic debate about the causes of preferences over immigration. This debate centers around the relative influences of sociotropic or personal economic considerations, as well as noneconomic threats. We provide a test of the competing egocentric, sociotropic, and noneconomic paradigms using a novel constrained preference experiment in which respondents are asked to trade off preferred reductions in immigration levels with realistic estimates of the personal or societal costs associated with those reductions. This survey experiment, performed on a national sample of British YouGov panelists, allows us to measure the price-elasticity of the publicʼs preferences with regard to levels of European and non-European immigration. Respondents were willing to admit more immigrants when restriction carries economic costs, with egocentric considerations as important as sociotropic ones. People who voted for the UK to Leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum are less price-elastic than those voting Remain, indicating that noneconomic concerns are also important.1

As political science experiments have increasingly moved out of the traditional western university laboratory setting, researchers have had to confront many new issues that had previously received less attention from experimentalists. Much ink and effort has been expended on the methodological issues involved due to the loss of experimental control and the difficulty in implementing and maintaining true random assignment. Moreover, as experimentation has become increasingly popular and more attention has been paid to the way in which we collect and analyze data generally, many are concerned with disconnects between design proposals and actual implementations – especially with the possibility of burying null findings or reporting findings that just barely meet standardized levels of significance – and with the ability of researchers to replicate results. Furthermore, questions of harm to human subjects – and notions of informed consent – have had to be revisited in situations far from the conditions in which these concepts were originally developed.

Mobile communication technologies can provide citizens access to information that is tailored to their specific circumstances. Such technologies may therefore increase citizens’ ability to vote in line with their interests and hold politicians accountable. In a large-scale randomized controlled trial in Uganda (n = 16,083), we investigated whether citizens who receive private, timely, and individualized text messages by mobile phone about public services in their community punished or rewarded incumbents in local elections in line with the information. Respondents claimed to find the messages valuable and there is evidence that they briefly updated their beliefs based on the messages; however, the treatment did not cause increased votes for incumbents where public services were better than expected nor decreased votes where public services were worse than anticipated. The considerable knowledge gaps among citizens identified in this study indicate potential for communication technologies to effectively share civic information. Yet the findings imply that when the attribution of public service outcomes is difficult, even individualized information is unlikely to affect voting behavior.