Do voters want representatives who share their race, ethnicity, or partisanship? We examine this question with a focus on Asian Americans who face trade-offs between descriptive (that is, Asian American or ‘pan-ethnic’) and partisan representation, as well as trade-offs involving ‘co-ethnic’ (for example, Korean for Korean) and ‘cross-ethnic’ (for example, Indian for Korean) descriptive representation. Across two experiments, we find that when Asian Americans are asked about collective representation in Congress, they prioritize more co-ethnic and pan-ethnic legislators over co-partisan legislators. However, in a competitive electoral setting, they often trade off race/ethnicity for partisanship. Asian Americans are only willing to cross party lines to vote for a co-ethnic candidate, but never for a cross- or pan-ethnic candidate. These findings shed light on the importance of considering heterogeneous preferences along ethnicities within the same racial ‘in-group’, such as Asian Americans, a heavily understudied and heterogeneous group in American politics.

Interest groups spend large amounts of money on public campaigns, but do these outside lobbying strategies change public opinion? Several recent studies investigate this question, but come to different conclusions. We integrate existing approaches into one factorial design and conduct a well-powered survey experiment across two countries. We randomize type of interest group support and message medium in support of two prominent climate policies. Our results suggest that interest group messages can have a short-term influence on public opinion. However, the effects are not different from policy messages without interest groups, are not larger for messages from interest group coalitions, and are only effective for subsidies, but not for increases in taxation. In addition, we investigate the mechanism linking outside lobbying and public opinion and find that outside lobbying signals higher support for policies among the public. Our results have implications for comparative studies of interest group strategies.

We examine whether different information frames affect how people perceive the domestic costs of sanctions and support sanctions. Using data from an information provision experiment in Germany and Poland, we demonstrate that people overestimate the costs of sanctions (Gross Domestic Product loss due to an energy embargo) in sending countries. Yet, this perception can be corrected through the provision of actual information, which in turn enhances the support for the sanction. Contrasting sanctions’ costs with other costs – Covid-19 costs and costs imposed on target countries – has no additional effect.

How does femonationalism, defined as the selective invocation of gender equality to promote exclusionary anti-immigrant policies, affect citizens? While increasingly common across Western democracies, its impact on citizens’ preferences remains underexplored. This paper provides evidence from a preregistered survey experiment with 3,118 U.S. citizens, showing that femonationalist rhetoric can enhance opposition to pluralist policies in defense of progressive gender achievements. The effect is conditional on citizens’ prior immigration attitudes: anti-immigration individuals liberalize their gender views, while pro-immigration individuals demand stricter integration policies. The findings suggest that citizens are not consistent in their ideological preferences, especially when political elites frame liberal values as conflicting.

Since May 2022, activists in many countries have been protesting, targeting artworks in famous museums and squares, capturing the attention of citizens, media, and authorities. This new wave of protests was not immune to criticism from bystanders, media, and public institutions. Some governments issued legislation to specifically sanction climate activists who target cultural heritage. Hence, the question arises as to how exposure to such protests affects citizens’ attitudes and behaviors toward the environment. To address that question, this study relies on two original datasets. First, a data collection of all instances of climate protests targeting artwork that occurred from May 2022 to August 2024. Second, an original pre-registered survey experiment (n ≈ 1,000), conducted in August–September 2024 in Italy, where the highest concentrations of such acts of protest were recorded. This paper examines whether exposure to climate protests targeting artwork negatively impacts public opinion levels of environmental concern, pro-environmental voting, and pro-environmental behavior. The results suggest that public opinion does not endorse climate protests targeting artwork, but exposure to them has no meaningful causal effect on their stances on environmental protection.

Inattentive survey respondents are a growing concern for social scientists who rely on online surveys for their research. While inattentiveness has been well documented in lower quality sample sources, there is less understanding of how common the phenomenon is in high-quality surveys. We document the presence of a small percentage of respondents in Cooperative Election Study surveys who pass quality control measures but still exhibit inattentive behavior. We show that these respondents may affect public opinion estimates for small subgroups. Finally, we present the results from an experiment testing whether inattentive respondents can be encouraged to pay more attention, but we find that such an intervention fails.

Recent literature argues that with ever‐increasing levels of supranational constraints governments have less ‘room to manoeuvre’; therefore, voters will place less weight on policy outcomes in their voting decisions. The question that remains less explored is how voters fill this accountability gap. We argue that, in this context, voters may move away from outcome‐ to input‐oriented voting. Fulfilling their promises becomes less vital for incumbents as long as they exhibit effort to overturn an unpopular policy framework. We test this argument against a survey experiment conducted in the run‐up to the September 2015 election in Greece, where we find a positive impact of the incumbent's exerted effort to challenge the status quo of austerity on vote intention for SYRIZA – the senior coalition government partner at the time – despite the failed outcome of the government's bailout negotiations.

Populism research has found much scholarly and public attention alike in recent years. Most research has focused on how populism can be defined, assessed or even measured. Even though there are emerging studies on populist messages, few of them have paid attention on causally identifying ways in which discourse can affect support for populist actors. This article positions itself within this gap and aims to answer which discursive elements make (non-)populist messages appealing to varying groups of people. To answer this research question, I conducted a novel survey experiment on vote choice in Germany from December 2020 to January 2021 with N = 3325. Respondents were asked to choose between two candidate statements that displayed varying discursive elements. Thus, the experiment causally tested whether people-centric rhetoric, blame attributive languages or populist style focusing on language complexity drive the populist vote. Results show that a neutral form of blame attribution, namely towards politicians, had the highest probability of driving vote choice, irrespective of respondents' underlying ideological preferences or populist attitudes. Simple language nearly always has a negative effect on vote choice, whereas people-centrism adds a positive touch. These results show that there may be an increasing dissatisfaction with democracy that is voiced by blaming political elites for the malfunctioning of society.

Does coalition formation have a causal effect on the perceived ideological distance between the coalition members? Observational research shows that voters typically think of parties that form a coalition government as more ideologically similar than those that do not, holding everything else constant. Their many qualities aside, the existing studies are not able to establish a causal relationship between coalition formation and changing perceptions. It is quite possible that voters are reacting to concurrent changes in parties' stated policy and not the coalition information itself. In this paper, I present two survey experiments that isolate the difference between telling voters that two parties can cooperate and telling them that they cannot. In both experiments, I find evidence supporting the theory of coalition heuristics.

Building on research on cultural threat‐induced polarization, we investigate the effect of the individual‐level salience of cultural threats on polarization between social liberals and conservatives. In a unique survey experiment conducted with 129,000 respondents nested in 208 regions in 27 European Union (EU) member states, we manipulate the presence of two cultural threats, women's rights, and refugee immigration, to test their polarizing effects on social liberals’ and social conservatives’ support for traditional values. We find that priming the threat of refugee immigration polarizes conservatives and liberals equally. Yet, introducing the salience of women's rights leads to lower preferences for traditional values, particularly among more liberal respondents. Our findings demonstrate: 1) the study of backlash should distinguish individuals by their predisposition to backlash, rather than studying the population as a whole; and 2) social conservatives’ backlash should be studied conjointly with social liberals’ counter‐reactions to backlash. Future research may investigate why different cultural threats provoke different reactions.

This paper presents the results of a conjoint survey experiment in which Swiss citizens were asked to choose among parliamentary candidates with different class profiles determined by occupation, education and income. Existing survey‐experimental literature on this topic suggests that respondents are indifferent to the class profiles of candidates or biased against candidates with high‐status occupations and high incomes. We find that respondents are biased against upper middle‐class candidates as well as routine working‐class candidates. While the bias against upper middle‐class candidates is primarily a bias among working‐class individuals, the bias against routine working‐class candidates is most pronounced among middle‐class individuals. Our supplementary analysis of observational data confirms the bias against routine working‐class candidates, but not the bias against upper middle‐class candidates.

The politics of representation has become increasingly complex in recent years. Amid weakening traditional political cleavages, the emergence of new political divides and mounting anti-elitism that have helped the rise of radical populist parties, voters face significant cross-pressures when casting their ballots. Despite a wealth of studies on the role of issue preferences in voting behaviour, there are still many unknowns when it comes to understanding how voters trade off competing issue preferences against each other. Studying issue trade-offs is also important against the backdrop of the well-documented preferences of radical left and right voters for redistribution and restrictive immigration policies, respectively. To investigate the strength of issue preferences among radical left, radical right and mainstream party voters and the willingness to compromise on their most important issues, we conducted a conjoint survey experiment with 2,000 participants in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The voting scenario in the experiment featured proposals on salient political issues and different (non)populist stances on political representation. The results from the cross-country study, as well as a large replication study with a sample of 4,000 German respondents, show that voters of radical right parties are willing to accept large trade-offs regarding their other issue preferences as long as their preference for restrictive immigration policies is fulfilled. Differently, radical left, Green and mainstream party voters have a more variegated range of issue preferences, some of them so strong that they are not traded off for their preferred redistribution and European Union integration positions, respectively. The findings shed light on trade-offs related to emerging issues such as climate change and the distinct logics behind support for radical parties. They also have implications for the electoral prospects of mainstream and radical parties when trying to reposition themselves in the diversifying issue space of contemporary democracies. As such, understanding how voters navigate issue cross-pressures helps to explain the broader dynamics that are (re)configuring political conflict and voting behaviour in Europe.

What can policy makers do in day-to-day decision making to strengthen citizens' belief that the political system is legitimate? Much literature has highlighted that the realization of citizens' personal preferences in policy making is an important driver of legitimacy beliefs. We argue that citizens, in addition, also care about whether a policy represents the preferences of the majority of citizens, even if their personal preference diverges from the majority's. Using the case of the European Union (EU) as a system that has recurringly experienced crises of public legitimacy, we conduct a vignette survey experiment in which respondents assess the legitimacy of fictitious EU decisions that vary in how they were taken and whose preferences they represent. Results from original surveys conducted in the five largest EU countries show that the congruence of EU decisions not only with personal opinion but also with different forms of majority opinion significantly strengthens legitimacy beliefs. We also show that the most likely mechanism behind this finding is the application of a ‘consensus heuristic’, by which respondents use majority opinion as a cue to identify legitimate decisions. In contrast, procedural features such as the consultation of interest groups or the inclusiveness of decision making in the institutions have little effect on legitimacy beliefs. These findings suggest that policy makers can address legitimacy deficits by strengthening majority representation, which will have both egotropic and sociotropic effects.

A large literature studies whether, and under what circumstances, voters will electorally punish corrupt politicians. Yet this literature has to date neglected the empirical prevalence of transnational dimensions to real‐world corruption allegations, even as corruption studies undergo a ‘transnational turn’. We use a survey experiment in the United Kingdom in 2020 to investigate whether voters differentially punish politicians associated with transnational corruption and test four different potential mechanisms: information salience, country‐based discrimination, economic nationalism and expected representation. We find evidence suggesting that voters indeed differentially punish transnational corruption, but only when it involves countries perceived negatively by the public (i.e. a ‘Moscow‐based firm’). This is most consistent with a mechanism of country‐based discrimination, while we find no evidence consistent with any other mechanism. These results suggest that existing experimental studies might understate the potential for electoral accountability by neglecting real‐world corruption allegations’ frequent transnational dimension.

Interest groups are often included as key actors in consultation processes, with the aim of making policy more effective, fair and representative. At the same time, their influence is frequently viewed with suspicion. This research note uses survey experiments in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States (N = 9,357) to explore how the ties citizens hold to different types of interest groups affect their perceived legitimacy of involving them in parliamentary hearings. We find that affective, behavioural and attitudinal ties shape how citizens evaluate the representation of groups, but that there are important differences between ties to different group types: ties to cause groups representing societal interests are more consequential than ties to business interests. These findings underline important heterogeneity in how different interest groups relate to their constituencies and have implications for accountability relationships between citizens and policymakers. The heightened sensitivity of citizens with ties to cause groups regarding their representation underscores the need to actively nurture and involve these groups in policy making.

Whether countries and their publics are responsive to the international legal commitments they make is the source of long‐standing academic debate. Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought real‐world significance to these debates. While Ukraine is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the invasion raised the prospect that other NATO members could be targeted and that Article 5 collective security commitments would be invoked. While recent research suggests that emphasizing mutual defence treaties can increase public support for defending an ally, prior work focuses on US opinion in a less fraught political environment. We constructed and fielded a survey experiment in Italy in the initial weeks of the Ukraine invasion to probe support for defending a NATO ally, the relevance of the Article 5 legal commitment on support for defending an ally, and the potential moderating influence of gender and political party. Our findings show that the Article 5 commitment significantly increased support for defending an ally. Consistent with past research, we find a significant gender gap, with men being more supportive of defending an ally than women; however, both men and women responded to the Article 5 commitment to virtually the same degree. The estimated treatment effect was larger for supporters of right‐wing parties than for the left; however, the difference was not statistically significant.

As representative democracy is increasingly criticized, a new institution is becoming popular among academics and practitioners: deliberative citizens’ assemblies. To evaluate whether these assemblies can deliver their promise of re‐engaging the dissatisfied with representative politics, we explore who supports them and why. We build on a unique survey conducted with representative samples of 15 Western European countries and find, first, that the most supportive are those who are less educated and have a low sense of political competence and an anti‐elite sentiment. Thus, support does come from the dissatisfied. Second, we find that this support is for a part ‘outcome contingent’, in the sense that it changes with respondents’ expectations regarding the policy outcome from deliberative citizens’ assemblies. This second finding nuances the first one and suggests that while deliberative citizens’ assemblies convey some hope to re‐engage disengaged citizens, this is conditioned on the expectation of a favourable outcome.

Academics and practitioners are increasingly interested in deliberative minipublics and whether these can address widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary politics. While optimism seems to prevail, there is also talk that the use of minipublics may backfire. When the government disregards a minipublic's recommendations, this could lead to more dissatisfaction than not asking for its advice in the first place. Using an online survey experiment in Belgium (n = 3,102), we find that, compared to a representative decision-making process, a minipublic tends to bring about higher political support when its recommendations are fully adopted by the government, whereas it generates lower political support when its recommendations are not adopted. This study presents novel insights into whether and when the use of minipublics may alleviate or aggravate political dissatisfaction among the public at large.

Not only the content, but also the context of election pledges should affect how voters respond to broken and fulfilled pledges. Borrowing from other disciplines, the hypotheses in this study propose that voters with low expectations reward pledge fulfilment more than voters with high expectations, while voters with high fulfilment expectations punish pledge-breakers more severely than voters with low expectations. A survey experiment using real-life political events was designed where 2465 respondents first received information that either significantly raised or lowered their expectations of pledge fulfilment. They were then presented with the actual fulfilment status of the pledge, either confirming or disconfirming their manipulated expectations, and asked to give their perceptions of the governing party’s performance. Interestingly, the findings support the presence of a confirmation, not a disconfirmation bias, suggesting that pledge performance attitudes are formed more similarly to other political attitudes than evaluations of private/public goods or services. Combined with a negativity bias in media coverage of election pledges, this confirmation bias in voters provides a partial explanation of the low esteem voters generally hold of governments’ pledge fulfilment. The results have implications for our understanding of how pledge fulfilment matters to voters, and how governments are held accountable for their performance.

How do politicians attribute responsibility for good and poor policy outcomes across multiple stakeholders in a policy field where they themselves can affect service provision? Such ‘diffusion’ decisions are crucial to understand the political calculations underlying the allocation of blame and credit by office‐holders. We study this issue using a between‐subjects survey experiment fielded among local politicians in Norway (N = 1073). We find that local politicians attribute responsibility for outcomes in primary education predominantly to school personnel (regardless of whether performance is good or bad) and do not engage in local party‐political blame games. However, we show that local politicians are keen to attribute responsibility for poor outcomes to higher levels of government, especially when these are unaligned with the party of the respondent. These findings suggest that vertical partisan blame‐shifting prevails over horizontal partisan blame games in settings with a political consensus culture.