Diverse information is key for informed and effective policymaking when addressing complex policy issues. Policymakers need to decide what information to process given their limited time and cognitive capacity. This paper presents an online vignette experiment in which 157 civil servants from a Dutch medium-sized municipality participated. We test how civil servants respond to the presence of a social nudge that stimulates more diverse information selection under conditions of low and high complexity. The results show that the effect of a social nudge on information selection is larger in a context characterized by high complexity than by low complexity. This study contributes to understanding how civil servants select information. Moreover, it shows how social nudges can improve the information selection process and provides actionable advice to governmental organizations seeking to improve the information selection process.

In federal systems where multiple orders of government share authority, do citizens care about which order makes a policy? To investigate whether citizens place importance on the order of government and whether if they do, this reflects principled preferences or implicit assumptions about policy performance, we conducted a vignette experiment in Germany. The design of the study disentangles the effects of policy adoption and financing from the expected effectiveness of a policy and its impact on regional differences. Our findings show that citizens are largely indifferent regarding the order of government that adopts a policy, but they show a modest preference for financing by the federal government. These results suggest that previously observed preferences for federal policy-making in other studies may reflect citizens’ implicit assumptions about policy performance rather than principled support for centralization.

Recent research draws attention to parties’ reliance on group appeals. Such group appeals are a tool that parties and candidates use to strengthen the association between voters’ social group membership and their electoral support. However, what we know about the effects of such appeals on voters is mostly limited to class appeals. Using two survey experimental studies among British voters (N=1,500; N=3,200), we shed light on the generalizability of the effects of symbolic group appeals for other types of social groups. We show that group appeals based on class, place, education, age, gender, and ethnicity all shape candidate support. We also theorize that effects are conditioned by respondents’ strength of identity and their deservingness perceptions and show that the latter are key to explaining voters’ reactions to group appeals. These findings clarify the scope and conditions of group appeals’ effects and advance our understanding of group politics.

The Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Plan promises to help low-income parents, especially women, participate in the economy. But even under this plan, care will be too expensive for many families. Several provinces offer targeted subsidies to reduce fees—unfortunately, these benefits are often hard to access and their popularity with voters is unclear. Using a pre-registered survey experiment (N=821), this research note investigates support for a hypothetical child care supplement to help low-income families. Overall, we find strong support for such an initiative, but little enthusiasm to pay for it through new income taxes. We then manipulate the ease of accessing this benefit. We find little evidence that burdensome child care benefits are more popular than easily accessible benefits. If anything, burdensome benefits reduce support. We then briefly consider how partisanship influences support. We conclude with timely recommendations for government and discuss the need for accessible child care benefits.

When democracy is under attack, the hope is often that citizens will punish undemocratic incumbents. However, recent studies show that not all citizens punish governments for their undemocratic actions. In this article, we argue that citizens' understanding of and satisfaction with democracy are sources of heterogeneous reactions. In a survey experiment conducted in Germany and Poland, we show that the importance that citizens attach to specific institutions under threat, as well as their understanding of democracy, can explain much of the variance in citizens' responses to undemocratic actions. Citizens are willing to defend what they consider important for democracy – regardless of whether this reflects theoretical conceptions of democracy. Moreover, in times of democratic backsliding, Polish ‘critical citizens’, those who are dissatisfied with the way democracy works in Poland, are more likely to punish governments for undemocratic actions. Our findings help us understand how to increase citizens' resilience against democratic backsliding.

Why do some people resolve disputes through the state, while others use religious or customary justice? We address this question by conducting a vignette experiment in Kosovo. We design hypothetical situations in which fictitious characters are involved in disputes regarding inheritance, debt, domestic violence, and murder. We vary information concerning (i) vignette characters’ resources, (ii) their beliefs about the efficiency of state justice, and (iii) dispute settlement customs in the characters’ communities. Survey respondents assess whether a vignette character is likely to seek informal justice, given the described circumstances. We find that respondents associate informal justice with characters who believe that the state would resolve their disputes very slowly, and whose other community members would not use state justice. These findings generalize to respondents’ own justice preferences and patterns of actual informal dispute settlement in Kosovo and beyond. Our article highlights efficiency concerns and local conventions as explanations of informal justice.

This article studies local processes of policy feedback by analysing citizens’ fairness perceptions of public childcare fees in a German town. Employing an experimental vignette study, we uncover complex feedback effects: first, citizens in the study regard a fee level as fair that is close to the actual fee level in the city, suggesting self-reinforcing feedback effects. Second, citizens strongly support a fee structure in which fees vary according to parental income. As this preferred fee structure differs from the local fee structure in the town itself, we interpret the citizens’ preference as evidence for self-undermining policy feedback. Finally, the actual characteristics of the respondents matter less than the fictitious characteristics of the parents in the vignettes, which points to the importance of interpretive rather than resource-based feedback effects. In concluding, we highlight the relevance of these findings for broader debates about policy feedback.