Issue ownership is an important determinant of the vote, and it is electorally beneficial for parties to build a strong reputation on their core issues. Even though issue ownership has already been studied extensively in the party literature, we know less about how citizens form ownership perceptions. We contribute to this literature by means of two studies on the connection between party behaviour and perceptions of issue ownership, with an empirical focus on issue competence reputations of parties. In Study 1, we combine party‐level information about issue attention, positions and performance with data on competence perceptions from a wide range of national election studies. Study 2 is a pre‐registered conjoint experiment designed to examine the causal link between party behaviour and perceived competence. Our results point to significant effects for all three hypothesised sources of competence reputations. Moving beyond previous work that has argued that competence reputations are mostly stable over time, after accounting for the variation due to parties' popularity, our results show that they fluctuate in the short term and that parties have some level of control over how they are perceived.

Recent studies suggest that citizens are unlikely to trade off free elections for other desirable outcomes, such as economic growth. However, while free elections are central to democracies, today democracy is not often undermined by abolishing elections. Our study shifts the focus to citizens' willingness to trade off the more granular democratic principles frequently eroded in backsliding processes – such as judicial independence, media freedom or horizontal accountability – for higher incomes. Through a seven‐country conjoint experiment, we analyse how citizens prioritize among these principles and estimate their ‘willingness to pay’ – or the additional income needed to persuade citizens to give these principles up. We find that while citizens do not relinquish free elections easily, they are more open to forgo liberal principles undermined in backsliding processes, especially when these principles are eroded gradually, one at a time. These findings help explain why democratic backsliding may be often tolerated by citizens.

Does gender affect candidate selection and list placement under proportional representation (PR)? Existing research argues that PR systems have a positive effect on women's representation due to a more inclusive candidate selection process. However, analysing the actual process of candidate selection under PR before observing the final party list is challenging, and little is known about the preferences and strategies of party elites when selecting and ranking candidates. To address this lacuna, we conduct a novel two‐stage conjoint experiment with party elites in Austria, which allows us to differentiate between two distinct mechanisms in candidate nomination under PR: selection and ranking. Our findings indicate that women generally have an advantage with respect to selection but find themselves subject to same‐sex preferences when it comes to ranking on the list, for which they otherwise benefit from being low in supply. These findings have important implications for understanding patterns of female under‐representation in PR systems.

This paper applies a conjoint experiment to assess the sources of contemporary social status hierarchies in Western Europe. Social status has become a popular concept in political science to explain resentment against economic and cultural transformations. However, we do not know whether cultural sources like race and gender have an independent causal effect on social status perceptions. Furthermore, these characteristics may be more contested between societal subgroups and thus have a weaker stratifying effect than income or occupation. This study employs an innovative conjoint experiment, conducted in Switzerland, to systematically assess the multidimensional sources of status. The design asks respondents to place profiles with randomized criteria and thus captures intersubjective status perceptions. In contrast to evaluating one's own placement on the social status hierarchy, placing others provides more accurate insights about the structural force of social status. The results show that both economic and cultural sources strongly shape social status, with occupation, race/ethnicity and income being most important. Furthermore, different subgroups agree on the hierarchy no matter their own status. This study helps to understand the structural roots of political resentment by showing that both cultural and economic inequalities are recognized.

This study presents the results from a series of conjoint experiments evaluating how the various components of political systems affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). Compared to earlier studies, our approach is unique in that we were able to disentangle the effects of otherwise highly collinear variables corresponding to three defining features of any political system, namely (1) access to power, (2) the policy‐making process and (3) performance. We fielded identical conjoint experiments in countries with significant variations across the key independent variables: France, Hungary and Italy. Overall, our study supports the view that citizens are more satisfied with democracy in consensus systems than in majoritarian democracies, while it also contributes to identifying the respective weight of the specific components of political systems. Respondents across all countries recognize that proportionality and party system fragmentation magnify their voices by creating a more representative political climate. With regard to output legitimacy, we find that respondents identify good economic performance and public probity as important features of a well‐performing democracy. The positive effect of the legislators’ constituency orientation on SWD is a particularly noteworthy result that is currently understudied in the literature. Moreover, the state of the economy has by far the biggest impact on SWD, which indicates a highly materialistic view of democracy in all three countries.

Despite decades of research on the nature and characteristics of populism, and on how political actors interpret populist attitudes, the study of how the public identify populist politicians remains a largely unexplored topic. Is populism in the eye of the beholder? What causes voters to perceive a political actor as populist? Is there any systematic heterogeneity in the evaluation of candidates among citizens according to their individual characteristics? We fill this gap by analysing what characteristics of politicians, and the political statements they make, drive citizens to classify them as populist. Furthermore, we investigate how the cognitive, ideological and attitudinal profiles of citizens shape their perceptions. To this end, we report results of a conjoint experiment embedded in a survey administered to a nationally representative sample of Italian citizens. Respondents were asked to evaluate different political statements by politicians, of whom we manipulated a variety of relevant attributes (e.g., their ideological profile, gender, previous occupation). Results indicate two clear trends: (i) More than the profile of politicians, what matters for their identification as populist is their rhetoric. (ii) The cognitive (with the partial exception of education) and ideological profiles of respondents are largely inconsequential. At the same time, populist voters are substantively less likely to identify populism as such.

Coalition building depends on citizens having a ‘compromising mindset’: they must accept that parties need to compromise in order to gain influence and that this entails deviating from the original policy positions. In this study, we show that European citizens understand that compromise is essential for democratic governance and that they, holding everything else constant, prefer political parties that express a willingness to compromise. This finding appears to be independent from specific forms of coalition politics and to be widespread across different levels of political interest, formal education and even ideological extremity. Our analysis compares observational data from the Austrian National Election Survey (AUTNES) 2020 and an original survey from Denmark in 2021. We also present results from a conjoint experiment fielded in Denmark, which evaluates the effect of willingness to compromise on vote choice. Our finding is good news for European democracies where coalition politics and thus compromise is a necessity for governance. Yet, for vote‐seeking politics, the situation is complex as citizens might sometimes punish parties for compromising, but sometimes also punish them for not compromising.

What democratic institutions and practices do citizens prioritize, and how responsive are their preferences to competing concerns such as economic and physical security? We explore this through a conjoint experiment with over 35,000 respondents across thirty-two countries – spanning democracies and autocracies – who evaluate hypothetical countries varying in democratic features, cultural characteristics, economic prosperity, and physical security. Our findings reveal that citizens consistently prioritize free and fair elections, highlighting their salience as a core democratic value. However, executive constraints appear less central to citizens’ preferences, especially when set against the promise of economic prosperity. These patterns hold across a wide range of national and individual contexts. The results suggest that while elections remain symbolically and substantively important, many citizens are responsive to appeals that frame strong, unconstrained leadership as a pathway to economic prosperity – an emphasis often seen in electoral authoritarian regimes.

Since the 2010s, social scientists have increasingly conducted survey-experimental studies that explore what factors drive public attitudes towards migrants in host countries. We conducted a systematic meta-analysis of 118 such studies, comprising 428,881 respondents from fifty-three countries. We find that sociotropic economic concerns play a key role, with individuals being more welcoming towards migrants who contribute to the economy through their professional occupation, education, or language skills. In contrast, there is limited evidence that hosts evaluate migrants based on egocentric economic concerns. Cultural concerns are also important; notably, we uncover a persistent anti-Muslim bias. Humanitarian concerns shape attitudes as well – especially towards forcibly displaced migrants, who are generally viewed more favorably than economic migrants. Climate migrants place between conflict migrants and economic migrants in terms of public perception. Our meta-analysis raises several questions that remain unanswered in the literature, suggesting important directions for future research.

In the last decades deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) have gained significant attention as tools to reform and complement representative democracies, with many governments adopting them. Political representatives, though cautious about power dynamics, seem moderately supportive of extending these procedures. However, little is known about how this predisposition is affected by the institutional design of these procedures and how this might affect their adoption. This paper addresses this gap by presenting results from a conjoint experiment in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland. The study, involving 716 representatives, examines how different attributes of deliberative procedures influence decisions to fund their adoption at the local and European levels. Findings show that the binding nature of DMPs is less important than composition characteristics, such as involving representatives in deliberations with citizens and organized civil society. Differences in preferences between local and European levels suggest awareness of challenges in scaling up DMPs.

Political and economic elites often warn that taxes on the rich impair economic growth. Although such warnings have a long tradition in elite discourse, what the public believes about the effects of progressive taxation remains surprisingly understudied. This omission limits our understanding of a basic democratic mechanism, the congruence of elite and public opinion. To close this gap, we employ a conjoint experiment during the 2021 German national election on a representative quota sample. Participants compare policy packages that entail changes in income, inheritance, and corporate taxes and evaluate their impact on equality and growth. We find no evidence that the public believes that progressive taxes promote equality at the expense of growth. Instead, participants believe that progressive taxes are doubly beneficial, promoting both outcomes. Furthermore, such beliefs do not vary by ideology or economic status. Our findings suggest a more consensual view of progressive taxation that emphasizes positive synergies between economic growth and greater equality.

Scholars increasingly conceptualize populism by whether politicians use people-centric and anti-elite appeals that pit a homogeneous people against a corrupt elite. These appeals reflect “thin” ideology because they offer no programmatic content and thus politicians must pair these appeals with more substantive positions, termed their “host” (or thick) ideology, which often consists of nativism on the right (e.g., espousing anti-immigrant positions) and socialism on the left (e.g., prioritizing redistribution). An emerging literature has thus sought to estimate whether populists garner support due to their thin ideology or their substantive host ideology. To date, no research has validated whether populism treatments (1) truly operationalize populist thin ideology, and (2) do so without manipulating host ideology. Results from three conjoint validation experiments fielded in both the United States and the United Kingdom show that thin ideology treatments successfully manipulate the underlying concepts but caution that some operationalizations also affect perceptions of host ideology.

As digital platforms become a key channel for political advertising, there are continued calls for expanding regulation of digital political ads as a distinct content category. However, designing policies to meet these demands requires us first to decipher what the public perceives a “political” ad to be. In this article, we report two preregistered experiments to understand factors that drive public perceptions of what makes an ad political. We find that both advertiser-level cues and content-level cues play an independent role in shaping perceptions. To a lesser extent, participants also attribute political meaning to ads that clash with their own preferences. These patterns were replicated in a conjoint study using artificial ads and in an experiment using real-world ads drawn from the Facebook Ad Library. Our findings serve as an important benchmark for evaluating proposed definitions of political ads from policymakers and platforms.

Existing research often interprets the limited impact of candidate gender on vote choice as evidence of minimal gender bias in politics. However, this overlooks the dual role of candidate gender, as both a heuristic for substantive representation and a trigger for sexism in voter decision-making. These competing mechanisms can diminish the effects of each other, obscuring the true influence of gender bias in electoral behavior. Using conjoint experiments in South Korea, a context where gender issues are highly politicized and sexism remains widespread, we examine how candidate gender affects voter evaluations in low- and high-information environments. Our findings reveal that in low-information settings, candidate gender serves as a cue for substantive representation, leading to co-sex voting among women, while simultaneously activating hostile sexism among male voters, reducing support for female candidates. In high-information settings, explicit candidate policy positions diminish the reliance on gender cues but do not eliminate gender bias. Instead, sexism manifests through opposition to gender-equity policies rather than direct discrimination against female candidates. These results suggest that information environments shape the expression of gender bias, rather than eliminating it, offering a more nuanced understanding of the conditions under which candidate gender influences electoral preferences.

This study examines how unelected representation, where political activists make representative claims on behalf of self-articulated constituencies, shapes citizens’ feelings of representation. Through a cross-national conjoint experiment (Sweden, Germany, Italy, and Romania, N = 8279), we test three routes to representation: descriptive representation through demographic congruence, substantive representation through issue congruence, and psychological representation through personality-trait congruence and personality-ideology congruence. Results indicate that unelected representation makes people feel represented through these routes. Substantive representation has the strongest impact, followed by psychological representation and descriptive representation. We also find that contextual and individual factors influence how these routes operate. Ultimately, this paper presents a novel perspective on the effects of unelected representation, laying the groundwork for new empirical models of political representation that are firmly rooted in the conceptual innovations of constructivist theories. Unelected representation may have important implications for modern representative politics.

Do citizens prefer national policies that are designed collaboratively over those produced by national government alone? The question is relevant, especially in Latin America, where citizens are sceptical of government’s capacity to address complex problems. In this article, we hypothesize that collaboratively crafted policies will be preferred over those produced by government alone in Argentina and Chile. We design conjoint experiments that ask respondents to choose among three pairs of policies, each of which varies randomly in terms of whether and with whom the government collaborates. We find that citizens in both countries tend to prefer collaboratively produced policies. This is especially the case when citizens have higher levels of trust in the actors with whom the national government collaborates. One important insight of our study is that, despite the costs of collaborative approaches to policymaking, citizen preferences for it could incentivize national governments to invest more resources in collaborative governance.

The American public is increasingly affectively polarized. A growing body of research has associated affective polarization with two key phenomena: ideological polarization and social group sorting. Although there is ample evidence that social group sorting, particularly along racial and ethnic lines, is driving Republicans’ affect toward the Democratic Party, it is not clear how it shapes Democrats’, particularly White Democrats’, feelings toward the predominantly White Republican Party. We propose a third model that bridges these two theoretical approaches, a racial ideology model that helps explain Democrats’ feelings toward the Republican Party. Specifically, we argue that Democrats increasingly dislike Republicans because Republicans are seen as standing in opposition to racially progressive policies. Using a preregistered conjoint experiment, we find that Americans across party lines see Republicans as opposing efforts to reduce racial inequality and that this perception is associated with negative affect toward the Republican Party among both White and non-White Democrats.

Most research on political identities studies how individuals react to knowing others’ political allegiances. However, in most contexts, political views and identities are hidden and only inferred, so that projected beliefs and identities may matter as much as actual ones. We argue that individuals engage in motivated political projection: the identities people project onto target individuals are strongly conditional on the valence of that target. We test this theoretical proposition in two pre-registered experimental studies. In Study 1, we rely on a unique visual conjoint experiment in Britain and the USA that asks participants to assign partisanship and political ideology to heroes and villains from film and fiction. In Study 2, we present British voters with a vignette that manipulates a subject’s valence and solicits (false) recall information related to the subject’s political identity. We find strong support for motivated political projection in both studies, especially among strong identifiers. This is largely driven by negative out-group counter-projection rather than positive in-group projection. As political projection can lead to the solidification of antagonistic political identities, our findings are relevant for understanding dynamics in group-based animosity and affective polarization.

Why do citizens fail to punish political candidates who violate democratic standards at the ballot box? Building on recent debates about heterogeneous democratic attitudes among citizens, we probe how divergent understandings of democracy shape citizens’ ability to recognize democratic transgressions as such and, in turn, affect vote choice. We leverage a novel approach to estimate the behavioural consequences of such individual-level understandings of democracy via a candidate choice conjoint experiment in Poland, a democracy where elections remained competitive despite an extended episode of backsliding. Consistent with our argument, we find that respondents who adhere less strongly to liberal democratic norms tolerate democratic violations more readily. Conversely, voters with a stronger liberal understanding of democracy are more likely to punish non-liberal candidates, including co-partisan ones. Our study identifies political culture, particularly the lack of attitudinal consolidation around liberal democracy, as a missing variable in explaining continued voter support for authoritarian-leaning leaders.