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.

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.

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.

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.

Previous work on nonverbal cues has demonstrated the influence of candidates’ facial displays on voter preferences. However, the idea that visual cues affect political judgment by signaling the relative social solidarity (in-group vs. out-group status) between candidates and voters has received little attention. We fill this gap by experimentally manipulating facial cues associated with the physical features of gender and ethnicity (Afrocentric vs. Eurocentric-looking) and assessing their effects on candidate support in the context of the Italian 2013 general election. The experimental design is based on a CAWI post-election online survey conducted on a representative sample of Italian voters. We find that group differences between candidates and voters matter, but only among right of center voters, who respond more negatively to party candidates expressing “combined” (party x gender x ethnicity) dissimilarity. Gender- and ethnicity-based differences are, on the contrary, “assimilated” and accepted when the target candidate is from the voter's party.

This paper contributes to a growing body of research on voting technology and voter confidence, which generally concludes that voters are less confident in technology—particularly in developed democracies. Using a unique survey experiment, this paper demonstrates that far fewer individuals are concerned about election fraud involving electronic voting, compared with other potential forms of election fraud such as registering ineligible voters or voter suppression. Other interesting findings emerge from the data: Older individuals are more concerned about fraud with electronic voting but the effects of age appear to be conditioned on political polarization. This paper advances our understanding of the impact of voting technology on electoral confidence, and raises important substantive and methodological questions about priming.

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.

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.

In order to encouragee broad participation in deliberative forums, it is important to understand how people from politically less powerful groups perceive the deliberative experience and how discussion group composition affects their experiences. Using data from 27 deliberative polls from 2004, we examine how four individual characteristics (sex, age, race, and education) and randomly assigned small group composition predict participants’ attitudes about the deliberative experience. We find evidence that women, young people, non-whites, and those without college degree generally evaluate the experience positively, but find no evidence for the argument that including more people from these groups would lead to more positive deliberation experience for participants from the groups. That is, there is no interaction between minority status and group composition in predicting participants’ evaluation of the deliberation process.

Partisan identity shapes social, mental, economic, and physical life. Using a novel dataset, we study the consequences of partisan identity by examining the immediate impact of electoral loss and victory on happiness and sadness. Employing a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity model we present two primary findings. First, elections strongly affect the immediate happiness/sadness of partisan losers, but minimally impact partisan winners. This effect is consistent with psychological research on the good-bad hedonic asymmetry, but appears to dissipate within a week after the election. Second, the immediate happiness consequences to partisan losers are relatively strong. To illustrate, we show that partisans are affected two times more by their party losing the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election than both respondents with children were to the Newtown shootings and respondents living in Boston were to the Boston Marathon bombings. We discuss implications regarding the centrality of partisan identity to the self and its well-being.

Do politicians engage in ethnic and racial favoritism when conducting constituency service? This article presents results from a replication field experiment with local South African politicians that tested for racial bias in responsiveness to requests about public goods provision. The experiment represents an adaptation of similar experiments conducted in the United States, extending the design to a different institutional environment, albeit one with a similar racially-charged history. Although one might suppose that politicians in South Africa would seek to avoid racial bias given the recent transition to full democracy, I find that South African politicians—both black and white—are more responsive to same-race constituents than to other-race constituents. Same-race bias is evident in both the dominant and the main opposition political parties. Moreover, politicians are not particularly responsive to anyone. Implications for the further study of democratic responsiveness are discussed.

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.

Spatial committee decision-making experiments provide ample evidence for the predictive power of the majority rule core if it is not empty. Furthermore, an empty core does not substantively reduce the stability of majority decision making. In this article, I put these two findings to a critical test using two preference configurations from Fiorina's and Plott's (1978) seminal committee experiments. In my experiment, committees with fixed individual preferences make multiple decisions over time. Contrary to the existing evidence, I find that results diverge from the core in the course of the experiment. In line with previous research, an empty core has no noticeable behavioral effects.

Carey and Hix (2011) propose that a proportional electoral system with a moderate number of seats per district offers the best compromise between (1) accurate representation and (2) strong accountability. The argument is that there is a district magnitude (DM) level where the trade-off between proportionality and fragmentation of parties is optimal. This DM is called the sweet spot. We explore this proposition through lab experiments conducted in Brussels and Montreal. We find that the probability of achieving a “good” outcome on both proportionality and the number of parties is slightly higher at moderate DMs. We note, however, that this probability remains low.

Voters and political candidates increasingly use social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook. This study uses data from an online posttest-only experiment (N = 183) in analyzing how exposure to supportive or challenging user comments on a fictional candidate's Facebook page influenced participants’ perceptions of and willingness to vote for the candidate, as well as whether candidate replies to each type of user comments affected these outcomes. Participants who viewed a page with supportive comments and “likes” reported more favorable perceptions of and greater support for the candidate, relative to participants who viewed a page with challenging comments. Thus, the appearance of interactivity between a candidate and other users on the candidate's Facebook page can shape the responses of those viewing the page. However, exposure to candidate replies to either supportive or challenging comments did not lead to significantly more favorable perceptions or a greater likelihood of voting for the candidate.

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.

In Coppock (2014), I presented a reanalysis of Butler and Nickerson (2011), a field experiment that tested the effects of providing state legislators district-level public opinion data on their roll call votes for a bill. The reanalysis employed a method introduced by Bowers et al. (2013) to conclude that the Butler and Nickerson estimate of the total effect of treatment was biased downward; when spillovers were accounted for, the total effect of treatment was estimated to be nearly twice as large.

Israel is viewed unfavorably among wide segments of the public within several European democracies, despite being regarded itself as a Western democracy. Does drawing attention to Israel's democratic attributes improve views toward Israel? In two surveys with Dutch national samples, anti-Semitic affect, low anti-Arab/Muslim affect, and left-wing political orientation independently predicted anti-Israel sentiment. However, in experiments embedded within the surveys, making salient Israel's democratic attributes had opposite effects on Israel attitude across those on the right and the left – slightly decreasing anti-Israel sentiment among those with a right-wing orientation but slightly increasing anti-Israel sentiment among those with a left-wing orientation. We discuss potential explanations grounded in social psychological theory as well as implications for the strategic communication efforts of groups seeking to influence attitudes toward Israel.