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.

Utilizing a simplified version of the Meltzer–Richard redistribution mechanism, we designed a laboratory experiment to test whether it matters if voters were asked to decide on a tax rate or a minimum income, leaving the redistribution mechanism itself unchanged. Framing the vote about redistribution as a decision about a minimal income increases the individually and ideally preferred level of redistribution. This effect outlives the groups’ deliberation processes and leads to the implementation of a higher level of redistribution.

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.

When do societies succeed in providing public goods? Previous research suggests that public goods contributions correlate with expectations about cooperation by others among students and other demographic subgroups. However, we lack knowledge about whether the effect of expected cooperation is causal and a general feature of populations. We fielded representative surveys (N = 8,500) in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States that included a public goods game and a novel between-subjects experiment. The experiment varied expectations about cooperation by others. We find that higher expected cooperation by others causes a significant increase in individual contributions. When classifying contribution schedules, we find that almost 50% of the population employs a conditionally cooperative strategy. These individuals are on average richer, younger, and more educated. Our results help explain the varying success of societal groups in overcoming cooperation problems and assist policymakers in the design of institutions meant to solve social dilemmas.

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.

In the past decade, the body of research using experimental approaches to investigate the responsiveness of elected officials has grown exponentially. Given this explosion of work, a systematic assessment of these studies is needed not only to take stock of what we have learned so far about democratic responsiveness, but also to inform the design of future studies. In this article, I conduct the first meta-analysis of all experiments that examine elite responsiveness to constituent communication. I find that racial/ethnic minorities and messages sent to elected officials (as opposed to non-elected) are significantly less likely to receive a response. A qualitative review of the literature further suggests that some of these inequalities in responsiveness are driven by personal biases of public officials, rather than strategic, electoral considerations. The findings of this study provide important qualifications and context to prominent individual studies in the field.