In spite of its immense global impact, Republicans and Democrats disagree on how serious a problem the coronavirus pandemic is. One likely reason is the political elites to whom partisans listen. As a means of shoring up support, President Trump largely downplayed but at times hyped the severity of the virus. Do these messages influence the perceived seriousness of the virus’s death toll, how the president is evaluated as well as support for and compliance with social distancing guidelines? Results suggest that Republican identifiers had by early June crystallized their views on the virus’s seriousness, the president’s performance, and social distancing policies and behaviors. Unexpectedly, information critical of President Trump’s policy decisions produced a backlash causing people to show less concern about the virus’s death toll and rate the president’s performance even more highly.

COVID-19 is expected to radically alter higher education in the United States and to further limit the availability of tenure-track academic positions. How has the pandemic and its associated fallout affected doctoral students’ career aspirations and priorities? We investigate this question by comparing responses to a PhD career survey prior to and following significant developments in the pandemic. We find little evidence that the pandemic caused substantial shifts in PhD students’ aspirations and priorities. However, some differences emerge when considering later dates in our survey period, particularly among more senior students who express a greater interest in some non-academic careers and job characteristics. Contrary to expectation, we also find evidence that the pandemic improved some students’ perceptions of their academic departments. In our conclusion, we speculate whether steps taken by the comparatively well-resourced institution that we study helped to mitigate some of the more negative consequences of the pandemic.

Migrants are often scapegoated during public health crises. Can such crises create opportunities for migrant inclusion instead? As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, many refugee organizations have stepped up their outreach with stories of refugees helping out in the crisis. We have partnered with the country’s leading refugee advocate organizations to test whether solidarity narratives increase public engagement with refugee advocates. We employ a Facebook experimental design to evaluate the effectiveness of refugee narratives. We test whether (1) migrant narratives framed in the context of COVID-19, (2) COVID-19 migrant narratives targeted to more or less local communities, and (3) COVID-19 migrant narratives labeled as refugee vs. immigrant efforts enhance public engagement with refugee organizations. Our results indicate that migrant narratives framed in the context of COVID-19 do not motivate greater engagement than those that make no mention of the pandemic. Our results provide suggestive evidence that locally targeted efforts motivate greater engagement. Finally, we find no difference between the “refugee” and “immigrant” label, but we show that both labels can motivate greater engagement than ads that include neither. Importantly, this is true even in the context of COVID-19, an uncertain environment where worries of backlash might be warranted. These results suggest promising strategies for migrant policy organizations to promote engagement during and possibly after the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed unprecedented pressure on governments to engage in widespread cash transfers directly to citizens to help mitigate economic losses. Major and near-universal redistribution efforts have been deployed, but there is remarkably little understanding of where the mass public believes financial support is warranted. Using experimental evidence, we evaluate whether considerations related to deservingness, similarity, and prejudicial attitudes structure support for these transfers. A preregistered experiment found broad, generous, and nondiscriminatory support for direct cash transfers related to COVID-19 in Canada. The second study, accepted as a preregistered report, further probes these dynamics by comparing COVID-19-related outlays with nonemergency ones. We find that COVID-19-related spending was more universal as compared to a more generic cash allocation program. Given that the results were driven by the income of hypothetical recipients, we find broad support for disaster relief that is not means-tested or otherwise constrained by pre-disaster income.

Social choice theory demonstrates that majority rule is generically indeterminate. However, from an empirical perspective, large and arbitrary policy shifts are rare events in politics. The uncovered set (UCS) is the dominant preference-based explanation for the apparent empirical predictability of majority rule in multiple dimensions. Its underlying logic assumes that voters act strategically, considering the ultimate consequences of their actions. I argue that all empirical applications of the UCS rest on an incomplete behavioral model assuming purely egoistically motivated individuals. Beyond material self-interest, prosocial motivations offer an additional factor to explain the outcomes of majority rule. I test my claim in a series of committee decision-making experiments in which I systematically vary the fairness properties of the policy space while keeping the location of the UCS constant. The experimental results overwhelmingly support the prosociality explanation.

Early research suggested that education was a major factor in structuring rates of political participation and social capital. More recent work based on experimental or quasi-experimental evidence offers mixed findings. In this study, we enlist a unique research setting in Romania, where passing the baccalaureate is required for entrance into university, setting up the occasion for a fuzzy RD design. The sample is drawn from a cross section of Romanians whose scores fall just above or below the cutoff. Because the sample is large and the measurement of exam scores are fine-grained, it is plausible to regard the outcome as continuous at the cutoff. Because the number of exam takers is enormous, we are able to focus on a very narrow bandwidth. The assumption of as-if random assignment is, therefore, plausible. We find that university attendance in Romania increases social capital as measured by our composite index, corroborating the main hypothesis.

Are FDI and Islam in conflict with one another in the eyes of Tunisians?  Does support for globalization fall or increase when it embraces or challenges Islamic dress, prayer, and other practices? We examine through different experimental tests how Tunisians react to foreign direct investment when it accommodates or conflicts with Islamic norms. Using three original sources of data, including a large representative survey (N = 4,986), a conjoint survey experiment (N = 1,502), and an original survey experiment with experimental social vignettes (N = 504), we examine how threats (and non-threats) from FDI to Islamic norms affect support for FDI. We find strong support for FDI, but these levels of support are not stable. We find the support for FDI falls by almost 32% if it is seen to clash with female Islamic dress. Support is highest when it accommodates Islamic practices, especially the female hijab and lowest when it is perceived to disregard these practices.

Incumbents often seek to wield power in ways that are formally legal but informally proscribed. Why do voters endorse these power grabs? Prior literature focuses on polarization. We propose instead that many voters are majoritarian, in that they view popularly elected leaders’ actions as inherently democratic – even when those actions undermine liberal democracy. We find support for this claim in two original survey experiments, arguing that majoritarians’ desire to give wide latitude to elected officials is an important but understudied threat to liberal democracy in the United States.

What explains divides in the public’s support for trade protection? Traditional economic arguments primarily focus on individuals’ expectations for increased or decreased wages in the face of greater economic openness, yet studies testing such wage-based concerns identify a different divide as well: even after accounting for wage effects, women are typically more supportive of trade protection. We argue that trade-induced employment volatility and the resulting concerns for employment stability are overlooked factors that help explain the gender divide in attitudes. Due to both structural discrimination and societal norms, we theorize that working women are more responsive to the threat of trade-related employment instability than male counterparts. Using an experiment fielded on national samples in the USA and Canada, we find that most respondents have weak reactions to volatility, but volatility has a significant effect on women who are the most vulnerable to trade’s disruptive effects – those working in import-competing industries and those with limited education.

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.

This study explores the impact of repression of foreign protests and the media source reporting the news upon American foreign policy preferences for democracy promotion abroad. We use two survey experiments featuring carefully edited video treatments to show that even short media clips presenting foreign protests as violently repressed increase American support for targeted sanctions against the hostile regime; however, these treatments alone do not inspire respondents to political action. Furthermore, we do not find evidence that mobile treatment magnifies the effects of violence.

This study examines whether politicians exhibit gender bias in responsiveness to constituents’ requests for public service delivery improvements in Uganda. We leverage an in-person survey experiment conducted with 333 subnational politicians, of which one-third are elected to women’s reserved seats. Politicians hear two constituents request improvements in staff absenteeism in their local school and health clinic and must decide how to allocate a fixed (hypothetical) budget between the two improvements. The voices of the citizens are randomly assigned to be (1) male-school, female-health or (2) female-school, male-health. We find no evidence of gender bias toward men versus women, or toward same-gender constituents. This study expands on the mixed results of prior studies examining gender bias in politician responsiveness (typically over email) by adding a critical new case: a low-income context with women’s reserved seats.

Can corrective information change citizens’ misperceptions about immigrants and subsequently lead to favorable immigration opinions? While prior studies from the USA document how corrections about the size of minority populations fail to change citizens’ immigration-related opinions, they do not examine how other facts that speak to immigrants’ cultural or economic dependency rates can influence immigration policy opinions. To extend earlier work, we conducted a large-scale survey experiment fielded to a nationally representative sample of Danes. We randomly expose participants to information about non-Western immigrants’ (1) welfare dependency rate, (2) crime rate, and (3) proportion of the total population. We find that participants update their factual beliefs in light of correct information, but reinterpret the information in a highly selective fashion, ultimately failing to change their policy preferences.

Is people’s willingness to implement their fairness views on a group dependent on how many in the group share their view? We designed a new experiment to answer this question. Spectator participants were asked how many other participants they believe share their view of whether it is fair to redistribute income in a work task. They were then given the option to pay two cents to implement the distribution they found fair upon a pair of participants who had completed the work task. Although spectator participants systematically overestimate how many share their fairness view, being informed about the true number does not affect their decision to implement the distribution they found fair. The results suggest that people are motivated to implement their fairness view regardless of whether their view is at odds with that of those who are affected.

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.

Psychological attachment to political parties can bias people’s attitudes, beliefs, and group evaluations. Studies from psychology suggest that self-affirmation theory may ameliorate this problem in the domain of politics on a variety of outcome measures. We report a series of studies conducted by separate research teams that examine whether a self-affirmation intervention affects a variety of outcomes, including political or policy attitudes, factual beliefs, conspiracy beliefs, affective polarization, and evaluations of news sources. The different research teams use a variety of self-affirmation interventions, research designs, and outcomes. Despite these differences, the research teams consistently find that self-affirmation treatments have little effect. These findings suggest considerable caution is warranted for researchers who wish to apply the self-affirmation framework to studies that investigate political attitudes and beliefs. By presenting the “null results” of separate research teams, we hope to spark a discussion about whether and how the self-affirmation paradigm should be applied to political topics.

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.

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.

Recent research suggests widespread misperception about the political views of others. Measuring perceptions often relies on instruments that do not separate uncertainty from inaccuracy. We present new experimental measures of second-order political beliefs. To carefully measure political (mis)perceptions, we have subjects report beliefs as probabilities. To encourage accuracy, we provide micro-incentives for each response. To measure learning, we provide information sequentially about the perception of interest. We illustrate our method by applying it to perceptions of vote choice in the 2016 presidential election. Subjects made inferences about randomly selected American National Election Study (ANES) respondents. Before and after receiving information about the other, subjects reported a probabilistic belief about the other’s vote. We find that perceptions are less biased than in previous work on second-order beliefs. Accuracy increased most with the delivery of party identification and report of a most important problem. We also find evidence of modest egocentric and different-trait bias.

Dehumanizing language, or language used to describe human beings as non-human entities, is increasingly prevalent in political life. This dehumanization also occurs frequently in the world of sports. Sports and politics intersected notably in 2016, when Colin Kaepernick of the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers started protesting the national anthem to raise awareness about police violence against African-Americans. Kaepernick’s protests generated considerable vitriol towards him and other protesters, some of which was dehumanizing. In this study, I examine how dehumanizing language used against anthem protesters of different races influences political attitudes. Using experimental data, I find that, when a Black player protesting the national anthem is dehumanized, White citizens are considerably less supportive of the anthem protests and protesters. This effect does not persist when the dehumanized player is White.