Can African politicians play the ethnic card? Ethnicity matters for a host of outcomes in Africa, but debate remains about the extent to which it motivates the African voter. In experimental settings, we know that ethnicity shapes political support for hypothetical candidates. This paper offers an experimental test of the extent to which ethnicity shapes political support for actual, real-world politicians. Relying on Benin’s mixed-ethnicity President, this paper proposes a survey experiment that measures the independent effect of coethnic cues in boosting support across both coethnic groups. The results reveal that coethnic cues work: the same political actor can draw support from two different ethnic groups based solely on subtle ethnic cues.

It is hard to believe that we have been at this for four years, but our term as editors is coming to a close. During this time, JEPS has gone from being little more than an idea in a few people's minds to a full fledged journal with robust submissions, excellent reviewers, and valuable published research from a wide range of scholars featuring all different types of experimental analyses employed in the study of politics. We are extremely excited by what JEPS has become, and we hope you share our enthusiasm!

Survey experiments have become a central methodology across the social sciences. Researchers can combine experiments’ causal power with the generalizability of population-based samples. Yet, due to the expense of population-based samples, much research relies on convenience samples (e.g. students, online opt-in samples). The emergence of affordable, but non-representative online samples has reinvigorated debates about the external validity of experiments. We conduct two studies of how experimental treatment effects obtained from convenience samples compare to effects produced by population samples. In Study 1, we compare effect estimates from four different types of convenience samples and a population-based sample. In Study 2, we analyze treatment effects obtained from 20 experiments implemented on a population-based sample and Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk). The results reveal considerable similarity between many treatment effects obtained from convenience and nationally representative population-based samples. While the results thus bolster confidence in the utility of convenience samples, we conclude with guidance for the use of a multitude of samples for advancing scientific knowledge.

We investigate how selective exposure to various types of media shapes hostile media perceptions. We use an innovative experimental design that gauges the influence of viewers’ preferences for entertainment, partisan cable news, or mainstream broadcast news on their reactions to media content. This design represents a modification to the participant preference experiment used elsewhere, expanding a laboratory-based media environment to include partisan and mainstream news options, alongside entertainment programming. We find that people’s viewing preferences shape their reactions to news media content.

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.

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study the incentives of a privileged group (the “yellows”) to share political power with another group (the “blues”). The yellows collectively choose the voting rule for a general election: a simple-majority rule that favors them, or a proportional rule. In two treatments, the blues can use a costly punishment option. We find that the yellows share power voluntarily only to a small extent, but they are more inclined to do so under the threat of punishment, despite the fact that punishments are not sub-game perfect. The blue group conditions punishments both on the voting rule and the electoral outcome.

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.

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.

Branding of foreign aid may undermine government legitimacy in developing countries when citizens see social services being provided by external actors. We run a survey experiment on a sample of Indian respondents. All subjects learn about an HIV/AIDS program; treated subjects learn that it was foreign-funded. We find null results that, along with existing results in the literature obtained from observational data, call into question the view that foreign-funded service delivery interferes with the development of a fiscal contract between the state and its citizens.

The basis of social identity in Afghanistan is the concept of qawm. As qawm refers to an individual’s solidarity group, such as village, tribe, subtribe, or even ethnic group, it captures broad in-group/out-group distinctions. We analyze a survey experiment to explore how qawm affiliation affects individual perceptions of politicians running for a fictitious local election. Contrary to expectations derived from the literatures on Afghanistan and on identity politics, we find qawm affiliation does not influence voter choice or perceived importance that a fellow qawm member should be elected. Moreover, qawm affiliation actually undermines individual perceptions a candidate will work on behalf of voters if elected. We explore two general mechanisms that may explain these findings, including weakening social ties and salience of the qawm.

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.

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.

We report the results of a field experiment conducted in New York City during the 2013 election cycle, examining the impact of nonpartisan messages on donations from small contributors. Using information from voter registration and campaign finance records, we built a forecasting model to identify voters with an above-average probability of donating. A random sample of these voters received one of four messages asking them to donate to a candidate of their choice. Half of these treatments reminded voters that New York City's campaign finance program matches small donations with public funds. Candidates’ financial disclosures to the city's Campaign Finance Board reveal that only the message mentioning policy (in generic terms) increased donations. Surprisingly, reminding voters that matching funds multiplied the value of their contribution had no effect. Our experiment sheds light on the motivations of donors and represents the first attempt to assess nonpartisan appeals to contribute.

This study examines how anti-Black political rhetoric affects race-specific collective self-esteem (R-CSE) and internal political efficacy among African–Americans and Whites. Results from an experiment in which subjects received an anti-Black stereotype-accentuating message attributed to either a political figure or an “ordinary American,” or no message at all, demonstrate that the political message undermined how African–Americans regard their own racial group, activated beliefs about how others regard African–Americans as a predictor of how African–Americans regard their own racial group, and undermined internal political efficacy. For Whites, the results demonstrate that the political message moderated the relationship between how they regard their own racial group and beliefs about how others regard their racial group, though the political message did not significantly increase or decrease racial group-regard or political efficacy overall. These results provide empirical confirmation of the role that government and politics can play in self-esteem.

In this essay, we closely examine three aspects of the Reporting Guidelines for this journal, as described by Gerber et al. (2014, Journal of Experimental Political Science 1(1): 81–98) in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Experimental Political Science. These include manipulation checks and when the reporting of response rates is appropriate. The third, most critical, issue concerns the committee's recommendations for detecting errors in randomization. This is an area where there is evidence of widespread confusion about experimental methods throughout our major journals. Given that a goal of the Journal of Experimental Political Science is promoting best practices and a better understanding of experimental methods across the discipline, we recommend changes to the Standards that will allow the journal to play a leading role in correcting these misunderstandings.

Misinformation can be very difficult to correct and may have lasting effects even after it is discredited. One reason for this persistence is the manner in which people make causal inferences based on available information about a given event or outcome. As a result, false information may continue to influence beliefs and attitudes even after being debunked if it is not replaced by an alternate causal explanation. We test this hypothesis using an experimental paradigm adapted from the psychology literature on the continued influence effect and find that a causal explanation for an unexplained event is significantly more effective than a denial even when the denial is backed by unusually strong evidence. This result has significant implications for how to most effectively counter misinformation about controversial political events and outcomes.

This paper reports an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of repeated interactions in deterring leaders from using divide-and-conquer strategies to extract surplus from their subordinates, when every decision-maker involved is a group instead of an individual. We find that both the resistance rate by subordinates and the divide-and-conquer transgression rate by leaders are the same in the group and individual repeated coordinated resistance games. Similar to the individual game, adding communication to the group game can help deter opportunistic behavior by the leaders even in the presence of repetition.