As societal conceptions of gender have evolved, so too have survey-based approaches to the measurement of gender. Yet, most research innovations and insights regarding the measurement of gender come from online or phone surveys in the Global North. We focus on face-to-face surveys in the Global South, specifically in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region. Through in-person interviews, an online experiment, and survey experiments, we identify and assess an open-ended approach to incorporating respondent-provided gender identity in face-to-face interviews. Our results affirm that the measure is comparatively effective in minimizing discomfort and does not have substantial consequences for data quality across a diverse set of LAC countries. We discuss the potential traveling capacity of our approach and identify paths for further research on best practices in recording interviewee gender in face-to-face surveys in the LAC region and beyond.

Classic theories of public opinion suggest that negative shocks can undermine system support in weak democracies, but scant work has systematically assessed this thesis. We identify Peru’s explosive Vacuna-gate scandal as a most-likely case for finding a connection between corruption and political support. The scandal’s unexpected revelation in the middle of the 2021 AmericasBarometer Peru survey created conditions for a natural experiment. Applying an unexpected-event-during-survey design, we consider the consequences of the scandal for perceptions of corruption, system support, and support for democracy. We find robust evidence that the scandal increased even already high perceptions of corruption and lowered system support. Contrary to expectations derived from prior theories, we find no effect on explicit support for democracy. In the conclusion, we discuss the nuanced ways that scandal may shape democratic stability.

Online surveys of public opinion are less expensive and faster to administer than other surveys. However, nonprobability online samples diverge from the gold standard of probabilistic sampling. Although scholars have examined the quality of nonprobability samples in the United States and Europe, we know little about how these samples perform in developing contexts. We use nine online surveys fielded in six Latin American countries to examine the bias in these samples. We also ask whether two common tools that researchers use to mitigate sample bias—post-stratification and sample matching—improve these online samples. We find that online samples in the region exhibit high levels of bias, even in countries where Internet access is widespread. We also find that post-stratification does little to improve sample quality; sample matching outperforms the provider’s standard approach, but the gains are substantively small. This is partly because unequal Internet access and lack of investment in panel recruitment means that providers are unlikely to have enough panelists in lower socioeconomic categories to draw representative online samples, regardless of the sampling method. Researchers who want to draw conclusions about the attitudes or behaviors of the public as a whole in contexts like Latin America still need probability samples.

Terrorist attacks routinely produce rallies for incumbent men in the executive office. With scarce cases, there has been little consideration of terrorism’s consequences for evaluations of sitting women executives. Fusing research on rallies with scholarship on women in politics, we derive a gender-revised framework wherein the public will be less inclined to rally around women when terrorists attack. A critical case is UK Prime Minister Theresa May, a right-leaning incumbent with security experience. Employing a natural experiment, we demonstrate that the public fails to rally after the 2017 Manchester Arena attack. Instead, evaluations of May decrease, with sharp declines among those holding negatives views about women. We further show May’s party loses votes in areas closer to the attack. We then find support for the argument in a multinational test. We conclude that conventional theory on rally events requires revision: women leaders cannot count on rallies following major terrorist attacks.

Data quality in survey research remains a paramount concern for those studying mass political behavior. Because surveys are conducted in increasingly diverse contexts around the world, ensuring that best practices are followed becomes ever more important to the field of political science. Bringing together insights from surveys conducted in more than 80 countries worldwide, this article highlights common challenges faced in survey research and outlines steps that researchers can take to improve the quality of survey data. Importantly, the article demonstrates that with the investment of the necessary time and resources, it is possible to carry out high-quality survey research even in challenging environments in which survey research is not well established.

We assess individuals’ responses to news about threat, compared to news about positive indicators of well-being, using data from nine experiments conducted across eight countries. The general proposition is that exposure to news about threat increases tendencies to “tune in” to information, compared to those presented with news about better times. The evidence strongly supports this expectation: without exception, the average respondent recalls and seeks more information about terrorist threat than good times. Further, this pattern of results generalizes to other threats. The study thematically and geographically extends research on negative information and political learning. It also has broader implications: absorbing newsworthy information is foundational to the types of attitudes citizens express and the extent to which, and how, they engage in the world around them.

We theorize that evaluations of leaders under terrorist and economic threat vary by both incumbency status and politician partisanship. This argument is based on insights from theories of rally effects, economic voting, and issue ownership, and we assess it with data from four national studies. The first two are experiments featuring hypothetical candidates; consistent with expectations based on issue ownership, the analyses show that Republican incumbents (Democratic challengers) are viewed comparatively better in times of terrorist (economic) threat. Then, with another experiment and with survey data, we consider evaluations of President Obama, whose image under terrorist threat should be helped by his incumbency but harmed by his partisanship, and the reverse for economic decline. We again find evidence supporting our argument and, further, individual-level evidence of issue ownership effects. We conclude that threats, incumbency status, and politician partisanship interact in important ways as they affect evaluations of political leaders.