Which predispositions drive voters’ policy attitudes? This article tests the role of political values as a driver of attitudes relative to two commonly posited sources – partisanship and symbolic ideology. Past work has found correlations between values and issue attitudes, but these cross-sectional studies have limited causal purchases. I test the effects of traditionalist and egalitarian values on issue stances using six ANES and GSS panel surveys from 1992 to 2020. I find that values drive within-voter changes in policy attitudes under a variety of specifications. Additionally, values shape attitudes on emergent policies, which I test using the cases of welfare reform in the 1990s and transgender policies in the 2010s. In all models, values have as large or larger effects on attitudes as that of partisanship or ideology. I conclude that values are a core predisposition which voters employ to make sense of policy issues.

How do the effects of climate regulation on businesses impact public attitudes toward climate policy? While emissions intensity is the primary frame for understanding the effects of climate policy on business, theoretical scholarship and public discourse often emphasize that large firms will adjust to climate regulations easily while smaller firms will struggle. Because small businesses are sympathetic and large firms are unpopular, individuals who view climate regulation’s effects in line with this firm size account should be less likely to support climate change mitigation. To test this theory, we conduct an original survey of climate policy beliefs and then a survey experiment. We find evidence that distaste for large corporations increases opposition to climate action among people exposed to the idea that big companies can more easily navigate climate regulations than small companies. This work contributes to the literature on moral political economy and on the enduring difficulty of enacting effective climate change regulation within the United States.

Parliaments are the intermediate link in the representative chain connecting citizens to the government. The parliamentary agenda is often seen as highly responsive because public priorities are usually mirrored in parliamentary debates. However, the level of responsiveness is affected by formal and informal rules of each activity, which considerably shape the attention–concentration capacity and thus the possibility for policy change. During moments of crisis, institutional frictions can be substantially placated, making the agenda concentrating on the crisis issue even in the presence of high institutional frictions. Building on the literature about parliamentary questioning and agenda-setting studies, this article compares the determinants of issue attention for crisis-related issues (economic, migration, and pandemic) in the Italian case over the past 20 years, assessing their impact on written questions and oral questions with immediate response. This article overcomes a limitation of the agenda-setting literature which treats different forms of parliamentary questions as having a single logic and dynamic. Instead, we demonstrate that frictions are extremely variable among different forms of parliamentary questioning and thus, that written and oral questions exhibit different forms of issue responsiveness. This article explores which type of signal parliamentary questions are most responsive to – public concerns, media attention, or real-world indicators – and finds that the answer is highly conditional both on the specific issue under examination and the type of parliamentary questions.

In many authoritarian regimes, multiparty elections are held in which the opposition can potentially defeat the incumbent. How do ordinary citizens perceive the integrity of elections in such regime environments? We argue that government supporters adopt the incumbent’s narrative to consider elections fair and legitimate. By contrast, opposition supporters regard elections in such systems as biased and not meaningful. We provide evidence from large cross-country public opinion data and the unexpected 2018 Turkish snap election announcement to examine long- and short-term patterns of perceived electoral integrity. We find that the partisan gap in perceived electoral integrity is more substantial under electoral authoritarianism than under democratic rule. The partisan gap grows in autocratizing political systems, and these perceptions are mostly stable in the short term, even at times of radically increased salience of electoral competition. Our study yields implications for the dynamics between elites and citizens in autocracies in which elections remain a critical source of regime legitimacy.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol has made strengthening the alliance relationship with the United States a key part of his foreign policy positions. At the same time, South Korea continues to maintain a decent relationship with China, pursuing a precarious position to decide its role in the context of the growing US–China rivalry. The US has made the trilateral cooperation and close coordination among the US, South Korea, and Japan the centerpiece of its Indo-Pacific strategy, while South Korea and Japan have maintained their contentious relationship. The articles in this special issue address the challenges that South Korea faces today, focusing on two major themes in the contemporary era: first, how the US–China rivalry and power competition affect South Korea’s security and economic foreign policies, and second, how the bilateral tensions between South Korea and Japan affect regional security and alliance capabilities.

With a security alliance with the United States and deep economic relations with China, South Korea faces complex foreign policy choices amid US–China competition. A critical decision is whether to join the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), a US-led grouping widely viewed as aiming to counter China in the Indo-Pacific. The choice depends on its domestic politics as much as its relationships with both superpowers. Using a public opinion survey with a priming experiment, we investigate South Korean citizens’ preferences regarding the Quad. We find that, without additional information, nearly half of the respondents supported joining the Quad. Yet neither mentioning the security benefits of joining the Quad nor mentioning the potential economic costs associated with Chinese retaliation for joining the Quad changed their level of support. Nor did we detect any treatment heterogeneity. Beyond the experiment, we find that threat perceptions and party affiliation are strongly correlated with respondents’ preferences.

Intergroup attitudes and identity ties can shape foreign policy preferences. Anti-Muslim bias is particularly salient in the USA and the UK, but little work assesses whether this bias generalizes to other countries. We evaluate the extent of anti-Muslim bias in foreign policy attitudes through harmonized survey experiments in thirteen European countries (N=19,673). Experimental vignettes present factual reports of religious persecution by China, counter-stereotypically depicting Muslims as victims. We find evidence of anti-Muslim bias. Participants are less opposed to persecution and less likely to support intervention when Muslims, as opposed to other religious groups, are persecuted. However, this bias is not present in all countries. Exploratory analyses underscore that pre-existing intergroup attitudes and shared group identity moderate how group-based evaluations shape foreign policy attitudes. We provide extensive cross-national evidence that anti-Muslim bias is country-specific and that social identity ties and intergroup attitudes influence foreign policy preferences.

Critical media studies have long understood the role of the media in not just illuminating disputes between nations but in inflaming them. The media can be used to inform or distort the background and causes of conflict and arouse public opinion. This article surveys the potentially calamitous decline of public perceptions in China and Japan toward the other and asks if the media is a monitor of this decline or a party to it.

The development of father leave policies marks a critical step toward gender equality in family policy. Despite promising policy developments, father leave policies continue to face resistance and negative feedback from various stakeholders, constraining their development. Their implementation has exhibited considerable variation across countries, ranging from mere symbolic gestures to substantive reforms. This article provides a comprehensive framework for understanding their evolution, emphasising that progress depends not solely on public support but on a mix of factors, including electoral competition, policy diffusion, negative feedback, and crises. The contrasting outcomes observed in South Korea and the Czech Republic highlight how similar drivers can produce divergent policy responses, challenging the view that drivers (like crises or electoral competition) have a predictable effect on policy change. This complexity necessitates a re-evaluation of existing theoretical frameworks to more accurately reflect the intricate dynamics at play in policy development.

What are the characteristics of a political protest that enable it to win public support, and what is the role of the political environment? The literature has argued about the characteristics that induce the public to sympathize with protesters (such as the identity of the protesters, their demands, and their methods), but little research has focused on the role of the political context, which includes the presence of other protests making different (or even opposite) demands, the contrasting identity of the protesters, and protest methods. In the research reported in this study, we focused on two protests that unfolded during 2023–24 in Italy (protests by environmental activists and farmers/livestock raisers) to investigate the impact of protesters' identity on public perceptions of their action's legitimacy, when two protests with contrasting aims but similar methods occur at the same time. We used a pre-registered randomized experimental design that manipulated the sequence in which a sample of respondents was presented with descriptions of protests by both groups. Our findings suggest that the sequence in which protests are presented significantly affect respondents' perceptions. Once primed with the evaluation of the farmers' protests, in fact, they perceive climate activists' actions as more legitimate. Our results suggest that people tend to comparatively evaluate social movements and to adjust their opinions accordingly when exposed to cognitively dissonant information.

This study explores the role of influencers in shaping public opinion about feminism in Spain, a country where gender equality and feminist discourse have gained relevant public prominence. Although the figure of the influencer may appear novel, the process of opinion formation mirrors that which has historically prevailed for celebrities in traditional media. However, the inherent characteristics of social media endow influencers with even greater tools of persuasion. We test this argument by collecting a representative survey of the Spanish population and analyzing posts and videos from influencers’ profiles, employing manual content analysis. Our findings reveal that audiences of incidental feminist influencers exhibit stronger pro-feminist attitudes, while those of incidental anti-feminist influencers lean toward anti-feminist views. Additional analysis using propensity score matching offers further evidence of the persuasive power of influencers, even after adjusting for potential selection biases in their audiences.

The January 6th insurrection at the U.S. capital was an eye-opening moment for many Americans. With the 2024 election cycle in swing, members of the Democratic Party are using January 6th as a rallying call for the need to protect democracy. But were the events of January 6th viewed equally among liberals? We argue that the events of January 6th resonate for a particular demographic well-informed liberal White voters. We argue that liberal minority voters will feel the racial undertones of January 6th more than White liberals. Furthermore, we examine how voters of different races viewed the events of January 6th and how views on race relations impact their perceptions of January 6th. We find that White liberals are less angry about race relations in the aftermath of January 6th, and while they viewed January 6th as an insurrection and blamed Trump and Republicans in Congress for their role, they are less likely to say that racism and White Supremacy motivated the insurrectionists. This paper indicates that race plays a key role in political perceptions, even among those who hold similar political ideologies.

Since the 1980s, the study of opinions towards immigration has grown exponentially throughout European scholarship. Most existing studies, however, are limited in their scope and do not specifically refer to an aggregate phenomenon, but rather an individual one. This study seeks to establish empirically whether aggregate public immigration preferences across 13 European democracies relate systematically to national socio-political indicators or other underlying societal mechanics. Particularly, we analyze four mechanisms more in-depth, namely the predictive values of economic deprivation, immigration policy, immigration flows and the political environment. To do so we rely on country-level level data and update a unique dataset of immigration opinions. We find that (ii) economic deprivation is an important correlate of more restrictive immigration opinions, (ii) immigration opinions respond thermostatically to immigration policy, (iii) the non-asylum inflow of foreigners further restricts immigration opinions, and (iv) the immigration positions of government and opposition parties have antithetical effects on immigration opinions.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests dramatically increased the salience of police reform, yet the US Congress failed to pass any reforms. In contrast, state governments have passed hundreds of police-related bills since 2020. I summarize the plethora of state reforms passed over this period by grouping them into 18 key areas, including 14 I classify as pro-reform and four I classify as anti-reform. Next, I describe how party control and public opinion relate to state reforms. I find that state party control is a robust predictor of enacting pro-police reform policies, and that reforms are more likely in states with more Democratic and more pro-reform publics. While police reforms are responsive to public opinion, they are also typically incongruent.

Do climate change-related extreme weather events affect public concern, knowledge, and attention to climate change in China? Matching extreme weather events data from the Emergency Events Database with the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey, we first test whether people in prefectures with more extreme weather events consider climate change more damaging and have a better knowledge of it. We find no such associations. Moreover, we collect 2020 data on extreme whether events from local newspapers for five Eastern and Southeastern Chinese provinces and test whether these events increase public attention to climate change, measured by Baidu search volume index. No associations are found. Interestingly, in prefecture-days with more Covid cases, local population conducted more Baidu searches on climate change and the environment, supporting the ‘great reflection’ thesis, i.e., major shocks like the pandemic put a spotlight on fundamental challenges facing the humanity and have gotten us to reassess our priorities.

Does prosecuting perpetrators of repression under a dictatorship promote public support for human rights and the courts? We argue that convicting perpetrators in human rights trials reduces public acceptance of these violations. However, while convictions signal judicial efforts to end impunity, they may also call attention to the politicized process by which transitional justice begins. We estimate the effects of human rights trial verdicts on attitudes in Argentina, a country ruled by a military dictatorship from 1976–1983 that, twenty-five years later, initiated sweeping human rights trials for past repression. Using observational day-level opinion data from a survey fielded around the guilty verdict for one of the dictatorship’s top-ranking generals, we find the trial verdict increased the public’s rejection of torture and political killings. Yet belief in judicial fairness declined. These results suggest that trials solidify public commitments to human rights, but confidence in the judiciary is not a necessary condition for this effect.