The global COVID-19 pandemic has changed how elected officials govern, campaign, and present themselves. One key change is that politicians across the world often wear face masks when in public. To what extent does this practice influence how the public perceives politicians? We investigate this question in Japan, a country where people – though not politicians – often wore face masks even before the novel coronavirus outbreak. Conducting a survey experiment with a nationally representative sample of about $1500$ Japanese residents, we find that masks do influence public perceptions and that women politicians lose more public support when wearing masks than men. Given the nature of political campaigns in the COVID-19 world, we think that our results have broad implications for women politicians competitiveness, specifically, and for politics and gender, more generally. We outline these in the conclusion along with several new research directions.

Are personal stories more effective in shaping opinion than experts’ endorsements? This study investigates the persuasiveness of personal stories and expert endorsements in shaping public opinion on education spending and pollution reduction policies. Using a survey experiment in Spain, we found that personal stories consistently increased support for both policies, with a particularly strong effect on citizens with populist attitudes or voters of populist parties. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the success of populist parties and the influence of personal stories on public opinion.

In this study we show that on different dimensions of social security (compensation level, maximum duration and eligibility criteria), respondents in Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom prefer their governments to compensate unemployed immigrants less generously than unemployed natives, even after considering potential prejudices about work ethics, job experience, etc. We add to the extant literature in several ways. Based on survey experiments, we identify a strong economic component in welfare chauvinistic sentiments across the three countries. Chauvinism is negatively related to the income level of both immigrants and the respondents. We also find that low income reinforces the effect of chauvinism, a phenomenon we refer to as ‘intersectionality’. Furthermore, by comparing the preferences in the experiments with the actual welfare schemes, we find that the respondents are more generous than their respective governments regarding the level of compensation for natives as well as immigrants. When the comparison is between respondents’ preferences and actual welfare policies rather than between treatment groups, the respondents appear to be more welfare inclusive than welfare chauvinistic.

Why are women under‐represented even in democratic and egalitarian countries? Previous research considers either demand‐side or supply‐side explanations. We integrate both perspectives in a least‐likely case for the under‐representation of women, namely the municipal councils in Denmark. The data stems from a candidate choice conjoint experiment, a survey among potential candidates, and data on the actual pool of nominated candidates. On the voter demand‐side, we show that there is no pro‐male bias in general or in combination with other candidate traits nor that traits evaluated positively by voters appear more frequently among actual male candidates. On the supply‐side, we find that women are less likely to be interested in running for political office. This is primarily because women assess their own political qualifications significantly lower than men. The under‐supply of female candidates seem to drive the disparity suggesting that we should focus more on supply‐side factors to overcome the gender imbalance.

A common assertion in the nonprofit literature is that nonprofit organizations can become more efficient, effective, and sustainable by embracing social entrepreneurship in their operational and strategic posture. In this article, we examine whether the mere label of social entrepreneurship results—with no actual organizational differences—in an increase in positive attributions associated with a nonprofit organization, an effect we call the social entrepreneurship bias. We experimentally test for the existence of a social entrepreneurship bias by examining how the label of social entrepreneurship alters how people judge a nonprofit’s effectiveness and decide how to allocate scarce donation funds.

Polls and coalition signals can help strategic voters in multiparty systems with proportional representation and coalition governments to optimise their vote decision. Using a laboratory experiment embedded in two real election campaigns, this study focuses on voters' attention to and perception of polls and coalition signals. The manipulation of polls and coalition signals allows a causal test of their influence on strategic voting in a realistic environment. The findings suggest that active information acquisition to form fairly accurate perceptions of election outcomes can compensate for the advantage of high political sophistication. The theory of strategic voting is supported by the evidence, but only for a small number of voters. Most insincere vote decisions are explained by other factors. Thus, the common practice to consider all insincere voters as strategic is misleading.

Over the past several years an increasing number of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam and targeting civilians have taken place in many Western democracies, calling for more research on the impact of these exogenous events on citizens’ attitudes towards immigrants. Using a quasi‐experimental design, this study examines the short‐term effect of the Paris attacks of the night of 13 November 2015 on the attitudes towards European Union (EU) and non‐EU immigrants across 28 EU countries. Employing Eurobarometer 84.3 survey data collected in 28 European countries between 7 and 17 November 2015, the design allows the testing of individual attitudes before and after the Paris attacks and the spillover effects of this event in all European countries. It is found that the Paris attacks had a significant negative effect on attitudes towards immigrants, especially among educated and left‐wing individuals. Moreover, the negative effect was stronger in countries where the national political‐ideological climate was more positive towards immigrants. These findings are explained by theorising that first emotional reactions to the attack are the results of coping mechanisms whereby individuals are confronted with disconfirmation/confirmation of their previous beliefs: individuals who experience stronger stereotype disconfirmation are the most negatively affected by the terrorist attack. Overall, the study holds important implications for understanding the short‐term impact of terrorist attacks on public attitudes towards immigrants.

This article investigates the impact of populist messages on issue agreement and readiness for action in 15 countries (N = 7,286). Specifically, populist communicators rely on persuasive strategies by which social group cues become more salient and affect people's judgment of and political engagement with political issues. This strategy is called ‘populist identity framing’ because the ordinary people as the in‐group is portrayed as being threatened by various out‐groups. By blaming political elites for societal or economic problems harming ordinary people, populist communicators engage in anti‐elitist identity framing. Another strategy is to blame immigrants for social problems – that is, exclusionist identity framing. Finally, right‐wing political actors combine both cues and depict an even more threatening situation of the ordinary people as the in‐group. Based on social identity theory, an experimental study in 15 European countries shows that most notably the anti‐elitist identity frame has the potential to persuade voters. Additionally, relative deprivation makes recipients more susceptible to the mobilising impact of the populist identity frames.

Social marketing research grows increasingly relevant in the face of persistent modern problems; this study examines how social and temporal framing might influence the effectiveness of social marketing campaigns. By featuring diverse contexts, this study addresses both individual and prosocial behaviors. With a basis in self-referencing and psychological distance research, as well as social dilemma theory, the authors derive hypotheses about social and temporal framing effects. A between-subjects experiment, incorporated into an online survey among a large student sample, reveals the relevance of temporal framing for enhancing intentions to change both individual and prosocial behaviors. Social framing influences behavioral intentions especially in the prosocial condition. The category of behavior determines the effectiveness of social marketing related to that behavior. However, the small effect sizes and lack of globally interpretable effects indicate that social and temporal framing do not make relevant differences in social marketing effectiveness.

Learning has recently played a vital role in control engineering, producing numerous applications and facilitating easier control over systems; however, it has presented serious challenges in flight learning for unmanned platforms. Iterative learning control (ILC) is a practical method for cases needing repetition in control loops. This work focuses on the ILC of a quadrotor flight. An unstable flight might lead to a crash in the system and stop the iterations; hence, a base controller, the state-dependent Riccati equation (SDRE), is selected to stabilize the drone in the first loop. The ILC acts on top of the SDRE to increase the precision and force the system to learn to track trajectories better. The combination of ILC and SDRE was tested for stationary (fixed-base) systems without the risk of crashes; nonetheless, its implementation on a flying (mobile) system is reported for the first time. The gradient descent method shapes the training criteria for error reduction in the ILC. The proposed design is implemented on simulation and a real flight of a quadrotor in a series of tests, showing the effectiveness of the proposed input law. The nonlinear and optimal structure of the base controller and the complex iterative learning programming were challenges of this work, which were successfully addressed and demonstrated experimentally.

We study how competition impacts security-bid auctions by comparing Monopolistic and Competitive auctions. Sellers choose their security designs between debt and equity, and buyers select auctions based on sellers’ choices. We find that an auction’s security design has limited influence on revenue under monopoly, whereas equity substantially increases revenue under competition due to equity attracting more bidders. Despite this, sellers’ rate of choosing equity does not differ between the treatments. While theory suggests that security choice when acting as a buyer should be negatively correlated to one’s choice as a seller, we find the empirical correlation to be positive.

Behavioral instruments have unique advantages in certain governance contexts for the reasonable use of public products. Drawing on bounded rationality, we compare two major behavioral instruments – nudging and boosting – and experimentally test their effectiveness in promoting reasonable use of public products. We select the default option (nudging) and future orientation (boosting) as specific instruments. In Study 1, we conduct a laboratory experiment and find that (1) both the default option and future orientation reduce free electricity usage; (2) the immediate effect of the default option is greater than that of future orientation, but its delayed effect is smaller; and (3) the combination strategy is more effective than any single intervention. In Study 2, we conduct a field experiment targeting reasonable use of public toilet paper and basically replicate the results of the laboratory experiment. These findings reinforce our confidence in the effectiveness of nudging and boosting and suggest the possibility of bridging behavioral science with governance theory.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in motivated memory as a psychological determinant of economic outcomes. According to motivated memory, people tend to better recall pleasant information because it serves their psychological needs. Another phenomenon, however, predicts the same pattern: According to mood congruence, pleasant information is easier to recall for individuals in nonnegative mood, regardless of any psychological needs. Since most people tend to have some need for self-esteem and to experience more positive than negative feelings during the day, the two phenomena predict similar outcomes in most ordinary situations, but not all. To test the predictive power of these two phenomena, we collect data from a laboratory experiment and from a nationally representative survey. We study how individuals in a temporarily induced negative mood (via a video clip) or those who report a low baseline mood (relative to the population) recall negative feedback. Our results meet the predictions of motivated memory: Individuals better recall positive than negative feedback, even when they are in negative mood. Motivated memory is not just a matter of mood.

Although compulsory insurance mitigates the negative externalities caused by uninsured individuals, it raises the issue of insurance crowding out prevention. However, at the theoretical level, compulsory insurance and self-insurance (preventive investments dedicated to loss reduction) are know to be substitutes for risk averters but complements for risk lovers. This paper aims to empirically test these opposite predictions through a laboratory experiment using a model-based design. Our experimental results confirm the theoretical predictions: compulsory insurance and self-insurance are complements for risk lovers and substitutes for risk averters. This study strongly supports public policies advocating mandatory insurance implementation as they enhance risk lovers’ self-insurance investments. Therefore, a risk management scheme combining voluntary top-up and compulsory partial insurance guarantees an optimal risk allocation for risk-averters and increases the investments in self-insurance for risk-lovers.