Past work suggests that support for welfare in the United States is heavily influenced by citizens' racial attitudes. Indeed, the idea that many Americans think of welfare recipients as poor Blacks (and especially as poor Black women) has been a common explanation for Americans’ lukewarm support for redistribution. This article draws on a new online survey experiment conducted with national samples in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, designed to extend research on how racialised portrayals of policy beneficiaries affect attitudes toward redistribution. A series of innovative survey vignettes has been designed that experimentally manipulate the ethno‐racial background of beneficiaries for various redistributive programmes. The findings provide, for the first time, cross‐national, cross‐domain and cross‐ethno‐racial extensions of the American literature on the impact of racial cues on support for redistributive policy. The results also demonstrate that race clearly matters for policy support, although its impact varies by context and by the racial group under consideration.

Ever since the Great Recession, public debt has become politicised. Some research suggests that citizens are fiscally conservative, while other research shows that they punish governments for implementing fiscal consolidation. This begs the question of whether and how much citizens care about debt. We argue that debt is not a priority for citizens because reducing it involves spending and tax trade-offs. Using a split-sample experiment and a conjoint experiment in four European countries, we show that fiscal consolidation at the cost of spending cuts or taxes hikes is less popular than commonly assumed. Revenue-based consolidation is especially unpopular, but expenditure-based consolidation is also contested. Moreover, the public has clear fiscal policy priorities: People do not favour lower debt and taxes, but they support higher progressive taxes to pay for more government spending. The article furthers our understanding of public opinion on fiscal policies and the likely political consequences of austerity.

Most studies on European solidarity (‘bonding’) during COVID‐19 lack a baseline comparison with outside states. We, therefore, cannot say whether European solidarity is universal or geared towards European Union (EU) insiders (‘bounding’). We thus ask whether European solidarity is ‘bounded’, that is, whether it relies on differentiation between European insiders and outsiders. We argue that if existent, bounded solidarity constitutes a long‐term and thick basis for institutional building. To explore this ‘bonding–bounding’ dynamic, we use a vignette experiment embedded into an original survey collected in eight European countries (n ∼ 8900), covering all European regions. Our design varies the countries receiving solidarity, and the channels (EU level vs. member state level), policy domains (health vs. economy) and instruments (loans, grants, medical equipment, vaccines) through which solidarity is provided. Regarding bounding, we find that most countries are more solidaristic with EU countries than an outsider, baseline state (Peru), Italy excepted. There is, nonetheless, a strong heterogeneity between countries: France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden mostly want to help themselves and Southern member states, but not Central Eastern European member states, which we show is due to their perceived obstructionism related to the Rule of Law debate. Concerning the nature of solidarity, we find that most respondents prefer solidarity to be channelled through the EU and loans, with evidence suggesting a freeriding mechanism behind this preference. All in all, our results indicate that EU citizens form a distinct community of solidarity which, in line with a Rokkanian understanding of polity formation, plays a key role in political development and consolidation.

Systemic congruence between the whole legislature and the whole electorate (‘many‐to‐many’, or sociotropic congruence) should be the benchmark to evaluate a democratic system. Yet, most studies link shifts in democratic preferences to individual‐level representation (‘many‐to‐one’, or egocentric incongruence), since individual‐level representation failures should be more salient and visible for individual citizens. We argue that the sociotropic incongruence hypothesis has not been appropriately tested to date, because the measure does not vary at individual level in observational data. Using an experiment conducted in France, we manipulate various sociotropic (in)congruence scenarios at the individual level. In addition to the incongruence hypotheses, our original experiment tests whether offering expertise‐based justifications to incongruence attenuates the backlash against representatives. We find that, even when giving sociotropic incongruence a fair test, egocentric incongruence still consistently shapes democratic preferences, while the effect of sociotropic incongruence remains negligible. Furthermore, we find that narratives rooted in expertise claims do not attenuate the effect of representation failure on backlash against representative democracy: they exacerbate it.

Given that sharing a democratic regime or culture increases the likelihood of bilateral trade flows between country dyads, this article investigates whether individuals are more likely to support preferential trade liberalization with other democracies and countries they perceive as culturally similar to the home country. Adopting experimental manipulation of the regime type and the cultural identity of the partner country on nationally representative survey data from two emerging market countries, Turkey and Greece, I demonstrate that while cultural affiliation does not condition individual attitudes, respondents in both samples display a highly significant preference for trade liberalization with a democratic country over an authoritarian one. Assessments based on respondents’ endorsement of postmaterialist values, international trade attitudes, and interpersonal trust reveal that while the democracy preference of Turkish respondents are likely affected by functional reasons, both functional and normative dynamics condition Greek attitudes.

When making charitable donations, individuals would like to have some assurance that their resources will be used appropriately, but they do not necessarily have the time to research charities thoroughly. Charities have thus joined voluntary regulatory programs to signal trustworthiness and good governance. We conduct a survey experiment to explore if individual donors in the United States are more willing to give to a charity participating in a voluntary regulatory program. Because voluntary programs vary in their institutional design, we further test whether the provision of third-party auditing (to ensure that charities abide by program rules and obligations) enhances donor confidence in the voluntary program. Finally, we explore whether individuals seek to circumvent information problems by donating to local charities as opposed to overseas charities. We find that charity membership in a voluntary program does not influence people’s willingness to donate significantly, but that location of operations is significant.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a deep economic crisis that prompted governments and central banks to implement extraordinary fiscal, monetary, and financial interventions. We examine public support for these interventions using a conjoint survey experiment conducted in Australia and the United Kingdom in early 2021. Our experiment innovates by investigating public preferences across two main categories of intervention: (1) wage subsidies designed to address employment and income risks and (2) financial stabilization measures aimed at supporting the balance sheets of households, businesses, and financial institutions. Results show that wagesubsidies received robust public support across diverse social, economic, and experiential cleavages. By contrast, financial and credit market interventions elicited mixed reactions, with strongest opposition toward those benefiting large firms and banks. We argue that the variation in support is primarily driven by an alignment of fairness considerations and policy design. In both countries, wage subsidies had key design features that made them more likely to be perceived as distributionally neutral, consistent with important fairness norms, and limiting the potential for free riding. They were available to all citizens experiencing verifiable employment disruption, delivered through employers, and appealed to welfare-chauvinistic views by excluding many recent immigrants and temporary residents. Moreover, the viral origin of the economic shock was widely perceived as exogenous and quasi-random, and the associated losses – particularly those related to employment and income more readily elicited greater empathy when borne by individuals than by firms. In contrast, financial-sector interventions, especially those aiding large corporations and banks, were less easily viewed as consistent with these fairness norms. These interventions were more prone to being perceived as favoring opportunistic or politically connected firms, echoing earlier public resentment of global financial crisis bailouts. Even some household-targeted financial interventions, such as debt relief and rent holidays, likely raised concerns among respondents about undeserved gains. Unlike some existing studies, our subgroup analysis finds little evidence that personal or local pandemic experiences significantly influenced attitudes toward economic interventions. Individuals who suffered direct health or economic impacts, or who lived in areas with high infection rates or strict lockdowns, were no more or less supportive of interventions. Instead, partisan orientation and perceptions of inequality were more predictive. Left-wing partisans and those who perceived rising or high inequality were especially supportive of wage subsidies and household-focused assistance. Traditional material cleavages – such as income, education, wealth, or asset ownership – had limited explanatory power. The underbanked population was an exception, showing more muted support for all interventions, likely due to perceived exclusion or limited personal benefit. We conclude that public evaluations of economic interventions during the pandemic were shaped less by self-interest or crisis exposure than by judgments about deservingness, fairness, and partisan attachments. Our findings emphasize the importance of policy design and political framing in sustaining public support for large-scale interventions during crises, and they have broader implications for the politics of economic policy in future global shocks.

How do threats of interstate conflict affect American voters’ propensity to support candidates who violate democratic principles? We argue that undemocratic behavior affects perceived dominance, which citizens value in times of conflict. We fielded two conjoint experiments and a factorial vignette experiment in the United States to test this two-step argument. First, our conjoint experiments demonstrate a robust and strong relationship between undemocratic candidate behavior and dominance impressions. Second, our vignette experiment – manipulating undemocratic behavior by in-party presidential candidates and priming threats of conflict with China and Russia – shows that undemocratic candidates are evaluated more positively under conflict compared to peace. This is especially the case among Republican voters, although the pattern is also evident among Democrats and Independents. Our letter sheds light on the consequences of the escalation of wars with relevance to the United States around the globe, pointing to toleration of undemocratic behavior specifically.

Who do we blame when bad things happen? Has division in American society made us less sympathetic to victims of tragedies? In previous trying times (e.g., 9/11 and Columbine), Americans rallied together to support victims and seek government solutions. In a highly polarized era, however, we have witnessed further division rather than unity. In this paper, I leverage original, pre-registered survey experiments to examine how much Americans blame and sympathize with someone who has tragically died from COVID-19. The studies find consistent evidence that partisans blame victims who hold an anti-vaccine perspective, regardless of partisanship. Less consistent evidence suggests that Democrats also blame victims who were Republican, but less than they do victims who held anti-vaccination views. Further, partisans are less sympathetic when the victim was anti-vaccine, but Democrats and Republicans are also less sympathetic when the person who died was an outpartisan. These results indicate that animosity towards outpartisans persists even through tragedy, but demonstrates limits to affective partisan polarization paired with evidence of rational blame and sympathy responses.

Most people are concerned about climate change and want policymakers to address it. But how? To investigate which policy options are more versus less popular, with whom, and why, we collected data in four European countries on attitudes toward 16 policies: taxes, bans, regulations, and subsidies/spending. We argue that support for different policies should reflect perceptions of policies’ net costs, and that such perceptions are likely influenced by people’s political trust. We tested this expectation by randomly assigning survey respondents to read different versions of given policies and confirmed that individuals with low political trust, who are less supportive overall of most policies, are most sensitive to variation in implied costs. We argue this interaction effect is a previously untested implication of the influential theory that political trust operates as a heuristic, and it helps explain policies’ varying popularity, including the puzzle of why carbon taxes are highly unpopular.

Inequality has increased over recent decades in many advanced industrial democracies, but taxes have rarely become more progressive. One possible explanation for the lack of a policy response is that, despite rising inequality, voters support higher taxes on incomes weakly, if at all. Using original representative surveys in Austria and Germany, we elicit voters’ preferences over the progressivity of income tax policy and examine whether exposing them to accurate information about inequality affects those preferences. Voters, we find first, express an abstract preference for progressivity but concretely support tax plans that are only somewhat more progressive than the status quo in Austria and less progressive than the status quo in Germany. Second, we find evidence that certain kinds of information about inequality moderately increase progressive tax preferences in Germany; however, we find no equivalent effects in Austria. While information on inequality does seem able to affect tax policy views in certain contexts, it seems unlikely that lack of this information can fully account for the lack of rising redistribution through the income tax system in the face of increasing inequality.

As extreme political views gain popularity and acceptability, the conditions under which media exposure to extreme right views contributes to this process, and strategies to counter media-induced persuasion and normalisation effects remain unclear. Using population-based survey experiments leveraging real-world interviews with extreme right activists on Sky News UK and Australia, we test whether media exposure leads to higher agreement with extreme right statements. We also test whether exposure affects perceptions of how many others agree with these statements. Our findings are consistent across both countries: exposure to uncritical interviews increases agreement with extreme statements and perceptions of broader support in the population. Testing the media strategy in the UK, we find that critical interviewing tarnishes the activist’s image and reduces effects, but still heightens perceived support for extreme statements. This study identifies a mechanism through which extreme political ideas spread and offers insights into media strategies to counteract persuasion and normalisation effects.

Scholars often use survey experiments to evaluate political messages’ persuasive effects, but messages developed in the lab do not always persuade in real-world campaigns. In this research note, we report three experiments on one central obstacle in lab-to-field messaging applications: getting people’s attention. We first analyze a large-scale direct mail campaign run by an established non-profit that promotes conservative solutions to climate change. In this experiment, postcards with messages based on extant survey-experimental research did not cause changes in key climate attitudes. In a follow-up survey experiment, identical postcards induced attitude change— Re but only when participants were required to pay attention to them. A final field experiment highlights the difficulty of inducing attention; in another real-world campaign, postcards with eye-catching scratch-off panels performed no better than standard postcards. These findings illustrate the crucial role of attention and the complexity of translating messages developed in survey experiments into effective real-world campaigns.

In experimental social science, precise treatment effect estimation is of utmost importance, and researchers can make design choices to increase precision. Specifically, block-randomized and pre-post designs are promoted as effective means to increase precision. However, implementing these designs requires pre-treatment covariates, and collecting this information may decrease sample sizes, which in and of itself harms precision. Therefore, despite the literature’s recommendation to use block-randomized and pre-post designs, it remains unclear when to expect these designs to increase precision in applied settings. We use real-world data to demonstrate a counterintuitive result: precision gains from block-randomized or pre-post designs can withstand significant sample loss that may arise during implementation. Our findings underscore the importance of incorporating researchers’ practical concerns into existing experimental design advice.

This paper investigates public attitudes towards education spending based on a survey experiment. It enquires whether a trade-off between education and other welfare domains, namely healthcare, unemployment benefits and pensions, diminishes support for higher public spending on education. Drawing on five Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (Italy, Spain, Greece, Mexico and Turkey), the paper demonstrates that education spending preferences are contingent on the nature of trade-offs and the priorities of the stakeholder groups. Testing the predictive power of age, income, ideology, labour market positioning and gender, our research finds robust support for public spending on education across all countries. Nonetheless, this support diminishes significantly when trade-offs that are linked to cuts in other welfare domains are introduced.

In survey experiments, should all covariates be administered before the experimental treatment? Some scholars argue that post-treatment items should never be used as covariates because the treatment could bias the measurement of those items and disrupt experimental randomization. Other scholars argue certain items—specifically sensitive questions measuring prejudice—should not be administered pre-treatment. They argue if asked pre-treatment, these items may prime respondents in ways that will influence how they engage with the experiment treatment, thereby affecting the overall outcome of the experiment. Using evidence from four studies (two original collections) that vary the placement of sensitive items—pre-treatment, post-treatment, or in a separate wave—we find little evidence that the placement of sensitive items influences the measurement of those items, the experimental outcomes, nor heterogeneously affects the outcome conditional on the treatment. However, we find the placement of sensitive items inconsistently affects the experimental outcome by interacting with both the measurement of the items and the experimental treatment condition. Overall, we find these measures to be robust to where they are administered. It may be best to place items pre-treatment to preserve randomization. If researchers have reason to include sensitive moderators post-treatment, they should transparently discuss this choice and the anticipated trade-offs.

Can states improve their international image by apologizing for past wrongs, or do apologies hurt countries’ reputations? We argue that apologizing can boost a country’s international image by providing reassurance about future behavior and conveying appropriate values. Yet apologies could also signal weakness, and their international effects could depend on reactions in the sending and receiving countries. To test these arguments, we pair large-scale US-based survey experiments involving Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the historical case of Germany’s 1951 Holocaust apology. In our experiments, respondents learned whether a foreign state apologized for past offenses, how the target of the apology responded, whether key domestic groups in the sender opposed the apology, and whether the sender was democratic or not. We found that apologies boosted foreign favorability and willingness to cooperate, and did not indicate weakness. These effects persisted even if the target rejected the apology or the apology provoked backlash inside the sender, and did not depend on whether the sender was described as democratic. The case of Germany’s 1951 Holocaust apology corroborates these patterns. Together, our findings suggest that apologies may be a powerful tool of public diplomacy.

What are the effects of reason-giving on political attitudes? Both political philosophers and political scientists have speculated that defending proposals with reasons may change voters’ preferences. However, while models of attitude formation predict that the explicit justification of one’s political views may result in attitudes that are more ideologically consistent, less polarized, and more stable, empirical work has not assessed the connection between reason-giving and attitudes. Implementing a survey experiment in which some respondents provide reasons before stating their opinions on six issues in UK politics, I find that reason-giving has very limited effects on the constraint, stability, or polarization of the public’s political attitudes. These findings have important implications for our understanding of deliberative conceptions of democracy – in which reason-giving is a central component – as well as for our understanding of the quality of voters’ political opinions.