Following the Dobbs decision in the U.S., there were widespread reports of misinformation regarding the ruling. Many Americans may therefore have faced uncertainty about abortion laws in their state, and Latinos—approximately 40% of whom are foreign-born—may be particularly vulnerable due to limited familiarity with the U.S. political system. To better understand awareness of state abortion policies, we fielded a national online panel survey containing large samples of Latinos ( N = 2326) and non-Hispanic whites ( N = 769). We find that Latinos were 6 percentage points less likely to correctly identify their state’s abortion law relative to white Americans and were 10.7 percentage points more likely to overestimate the strictness of those laws, even when controlling for demographic, religious, and political covariates. Foreign-born Latinos were also 19.5 percentage points more likely to overestimate the strictness of their state’s abortion law compared to their U.S.-born counterparts. These findings contribute to our understanding of differential learning following sudden policy change and highlight significant knowledge gaps that may affect whether individuals seek abortion care if they misunderstand the legal status in their state. Such gaps may have downstream consequences for health care access and economic inequality.
How do citizens of third-party states form sympathies in foreign wars? Most prior work on wartime public opinion focuses on the effects of information: material costs, elite assessments, and characteristics of combatants. Yet wartime coverage must also make choices about how to frame a conflict, separate from endorsements or facts. For example, a military intervention might be introduced in the context of one state’s sovereignty or the other state’s quest to restore democracy, even holding the facts constant. We argue that these normative frames have a large impact on public sympathy and support, especially in third-party publics, for whom material costs may be secondary considerations and loyalties may be open to debate. We demonstrate these effects with two vignette experiments among a representative sample of 1200 American adults. Framing decisions swayed respondents’ moral judgments and sympathy by 40–65 percentage points, and support for military aid by 20–30 percentage points. These effects were large and consistent regardless of the characteristics of warring parties, respondents’ foreign policy views, or their attitudes on current events such as the wars in Gaza or Ukraine.
This paper estimates the impact of presidential campaign rallies on candidate support and policy attitudes in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Using CCES microdata matched to rally dates and locations, I implement an event-study design that exploits within-county variation in interview timing around rallies. Rallies generate short-lived shifts that fade within 1 week. Clinton rallies consistently increase support for Clinton immediately after these events take place. Trump rallies show geographic heterogeneity—support falls in urban counties and rises in suburban counties. Policy attitudes respond weakly overall: I find little systematic evidence that Trump rallies shift issue positions, while Clinton rallies generate a modest leftward shift in a broad ideology index in suburban counties.
Public threat perceptions in East Asia do not map neatly onto aggregate power or generalized rivalry sentiment, yet their cross-domain structure has received little systematic attention. This article examines how concerns across distinct issue domains are associated with perceived threats from China and the United States, distinguishing between symmetric domains, in which responsibility for managing a problem is plausibly shared by both powers, and asymmetric domains, in which responsibility is more closely tied to one. Using original cross-national survey data, we estimate seemingly unrelated regressions that jointly model the two threat outcomes. Concern about North Korea’s nuclear program is associated with higher perceived threat from both powers across Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, while climate concern shows a similar pattern in Japan and South Korea but not in Taiwan. By contrast, belief that COVID-19 was man-made is more strongly associated with China-threat perceptions, whereas dissatisfaction with Japan’s historical apologies is more closely linked to U.S.-threat perceptions in Japan and South Korea, with different substantive meanings in the two countries. The findings indicate that responsibility distributions across issue domains organize public threat perceptions and shape the domestic terrain of alignment politics under great-power rivalry.
Across the advanced democracies, educational attainment has become increasingly linked to citizens’ political orientations. Education, it seems, polarizes citizens – with the higher educated turning to the left and the lower educated to the right. Here, we contend that this ideological divide between the highly and less educated does not stem from changing political opinions, but rather from a change in the issues that are associated with left and right . Drawing on over two decades of data from the European Social Survey, we demonstrate that Europeans have progressively come to associate left-right positions more with views on immigration. As a result, long-standing educational divides in immigration attitudes have become more strongly reflective of left-right self-identifications. Our findings suggest that the growing education-based cleavage is driven not by opinion change, but by the rising salience of immigration in structuring ideological labels.
Research documents that women political leaders tend to be excluded from the highest and most prestigious political offices such as the presidency or gubernatorial offices in the U.S. However, it is not clear if the perceived prestige of a political office directly leads voters away from supporting a woman political candidate or if other characteristics of the highest political offices hinder women’s advancement through the political pipeline. This research note examines how voters rate the prestige of various political offices from local to federal offices, and, through exploratory analysis, connects the perceived prestige of these offices to levels of support for women political candidates. I also consider the relationship between high prestige and high masculinity for political offices. The empirical tests in this research note do not find that perceived prestige directly leads to less support for women political candidates.
In recent decades, populist parties and candidates have gained increasing electoral support across the world. Despite this evident electoral success of populists, however, recent experimental studies find limited effects of populist rhetoric alone on vote choice. If such rhetoric is not effective in shaping voting preference, why would politicians adopt it, and what might explain the electoral success of populist candidates and parties? We argue that populism might influence elections through increasing turnout instead of or in addition to changing voters’ preference for candidates. However, existing conjoint and vignette survey experiments generally focus on forced candidate choice, which assumes full mobilization, potentially biasing the between-candidate choice estimates and missing abstention decisions important in real-world politics. To address this, we conducted a large-scale U.S. conjoint experiment of campaign messaging with an explicit abstention option to test for the possible mobilization effects of populism independent of persuasion effects and the various associated policy positions. Our results show that while populist rhetoric has limited persuasive impact, it can slightly increase mobilization, especially among voters who already hold populist views. Overall, however, voters’ alignment with candidates’ policy positions matters far more for both vote choice and turnout than the use of populist messaging itself.
Ageing populations are reshaping the political landscape in many democracies, raising concerns about intergenerational inequalities in power and representation. Do these political factors contribute to ageism toward older people? While ageism is a well-documented form of prejudice, its political roots remain underexplored. This paper examines whether perceptions of political exclusion based on age are linked to negative attitudes toward older people. Using original survey data from Italy, South Korea, and the United States, we study how both general concerns about older generations dominating political life and more personal feelings of age-based exclusion are associated with ageism. The results from all three countries reveal strong and consistent links between perceived political grievances and explicit expressions of ageism, whereas implicit ageism appears largely unrelated to political perceptions. Our findings suggest that age-based prejudice is not merely a cultural or psychological artefact, but is also connected to perceived injustices in democratic representation.
How do political scandals in neighboring regions affect people’s evaluations of their own government? By investigating the spillover effects of corruption investigations on public political trust in China, this article finds that scandals in neighboring areas can trigger a contrast effect among the public. Corruption investigations in nearby regions positively influence people’s trust in their local government, suggesting that evaluations of an institution are shaped not only by the institution itself but also by the performance of comparable entities.
While the role of legislators in parliamentary systems may sometimes seem to involve little more than to support the government of the day, legislators in many parliaments regularly take advantage of their, often limited, opportunities to introduce members’ bills and parliamentary motions. The success of these efforts is typically limited, which raises the question of why legislators bother. We argue that the legislators’ behavior is in part driven by the incentives their parties present them with. Government and opposition MPs behave in a different manner because government and opposition parties value legislative activity and types of legislative activity differently. Government MPs are expected to stay out of the way of the government’s agenda or focus their attention on less salient issues. In contrast, opposition MPs are expected to do the opposite and to present their parties as viable government alternatives. Examining members’ bills and parliamentary motions in Iceland over a thirty-year period, we observe patterns consistent with the importance of parties in shaping legislative behavior, while also finding some evidence of MPs’ career concerns affecting their behavior.
Surveys frequently report widespread belief in conspiracy theories, prompting concerns about their democratic consequences. Yet, standard survey measures often implicitly treat agreement as equivalent to politically consequential belief, even though agreement can reflect a range of engagement—from momentary reactions to durable worldviews. This paper argues that an important dimension of belief is often insufficiently captured in existing approaches: salience. I introduce a salience-based measure that incorporates certainty and prior familiarity to distinguish more tentative or situational endorsement from internalized, action-relevant belief. Using original survey data, I show that this measure correlates more strongly with psychological traits associated with conspiracism and better predicts self-reported engagement: including discussing, posting about, and researching conspiracy theories. These results suggest that traditional measures may overstate the prevalence of politically meaningful conspiratorial belief and obscure substantial heterogeneity among those who agree with conspiracy claims. By refining how belief is measured, this paper offers a tool to more accurately identify which survey endorsements are likely to reflect consequential belief.
We present a new event dataset on xenophobic violence in Sweden, covering all police-reported, hate-crime-flagged incidents involving physical violence between 2009 and 2022 (n = 2,522). The dataset provides a nationally complete and georeferenced record of violent xenophobic offences, combining programmatic extraction of structured police records with manual coding of free-text narratives under transparent inclusion criteria. It includes detailed information on offence types, bias motivations, temporal and spatial context, and characteristics of victims and perpetrators. By maintaining a uniform sampling frame across the full period, the dataset enables consistent longitudinal analysis of xenophobic violence beyond media-based or survey-driven sources. We present descriptive patterns to illustrate its analytical value, highlighting the coexistence of routine, dispersed assaults and episodic surges linked to external events. The dataset offers a transparent empirical foundation for research on hate crime, political violence, and the dynamics of intergroup conflict.
Recent survey experiments have found that the public in NATO member states is more supportive of intervening militarily on behalf of formal allies than non-allies. However, we lack empirical evidence on whether this effect of alliance treaties generalizes to non-NATO and non-Western countries. To fill this gap, we conducted a preregistered cross-national survey experiment on population samples ( N = 7200) in two Western NATO countries (the United States and the United Kingdom) and four non-Western regional powers (Russia, China, India, and Brazil). The results of our experiment show that while allied commitments increase public support for military interventions globally, their effect is comparatively weaker in non-Western, non-NATO countries. Our findings contribute to the scholarly debates on the microfoundations of collective defense and the generalizability of IR experiments beyond the Western context.
Despite gains in women’s political representation, many studies continue to identify structural and attitudinal barriers that contribute to their persistent under-representation in elected office. One commonly cited explanation is a baseline reluctance among some voters to support female candidates. However, research on gender affinity suggests a more complex picture: voters often prefer candidates who resemble themselves, and especially women are more likely to support women. This identity-driven dynamic stands in contrast to a generalized bias against women and raises important questions about how gender identity, beyond binary gender, shapes voter behavior. To address these questions, we use a conjoint experiment to test whether gender affinity influences candidate preferences and how it is moderated by gender identity. Our findings reveal a consistent gender affinity effect with women respondents preferring women candidates, and men preferring men candidates. These patterns are stronger among individuals with more pronounced gender identities, that is, hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity. Our study makes two contributions. First, by incorporating measures of gender identity, we move beyond a binary conception of gender to provide a more nuanced account of gender affinity. Second, our approach allows us to move beyond the traditional focus on affinity between women voters and women candidates to also consider how gender identity shapes political preferences among men.
Technological advancements have ushered in the promise of targeting potentially persuadable voters with personalized messages. One class of persuadable voters is those who are cross-pressured: they identify with one party but agree with policy positions of another. For political campaigns, targeting cross-pressured voters usually involves working with commercial vendors to infer voters’ party identity and policy positions. The effectiveness of microtargeted messages thus depends on the accuracy of those predictions. We analyze the accuracy of a leading US commercial vendor’s predicted policy positions using an original 2017 survey ( N = 397) asking voters their actual positions on 20 issues. We find a strong negative relationship between cross-pressure and predictive accuracy, at both the issue- and individual-level. Issues on which voters are cross-pressured are predicted with less accuracy. And the percentage of correct inferences about a voter’s positions decreases the more cross-pressured they are. While persuadable voters are a valuable target, reaching them is complicated by the difficulty in predicting their party-atypical stances.
Geographic representation is a central feature of democracies: elected politicians are expected to speak and act on behalf of their constituency. Yet, politicians differ in how strongly their communication and behavior reflect territorial attachments, for instance, in mixed-member proportional systems. This study examines these differences using a two-dimensional measure of geographic representation that captures both the localness of referenced places, that is, their proximity to an MP’s constituency, and their deprivation, that is, their lack of access to essential public services. Using named entity recognition and Wikidata linkage in a novel and scalable pipeline, we analyze over 50,000 tweets and 190,000 Facebook posts by all members of the 19th German Bundestag (2017–2021). Our results reveal a clear mandate effect: via district elected MPs refer to locations closer to their constituencies and mention deprived areas within constituencies more often than list MPs. Overall, the study advances our understanding of geographic representation and showcases the potential of computational text analysis for studying spatial aspects of political behavior.
How do voters respond to a political scandal? Previous studies emphasize partisan motivated reasoning as a key factor in shaping responses to political scandals but offer mixed evidence. I argue that partisans are less likely to engage in motivated reasoning when two conditions are met: (1) clear evidence of severe misconduct and (2) clear responsibility attribution to an involved party. By analyzing an unexpected video release of the Partygate scandal in Britain during which a nationally representative survey was fielded, I find that even copartisans and independents show a decline in evaluation of government performance in handling COVID-19, feel less favorable toward the involved governing party, and report reduced intentions to vote for the party. In contrast, I find little evidence that supporters of the opposing party show a decline in these evaluations, likely due to prior negative expectations and floor effects. The findings highlight the limitations of partisan motivated reasoning among copartisans and voters' intention to punish the involved party in the face of unambiguous evidence of government misconduct.
This paper examines white Americans' attitudes toward redistribution in the United States. Prior research has identified key predictors of redistribution attitudes, including political ideology, racial prejudice, or resentment. In addition to these factors, a growing body of work highlights the role of perceived status threat. Our study builds on the status threat literature by investigating the impact of racialized loser perceptions on opinions towards redistribution. We rely on evidence from an original survey experiment conducted in the United States in 2019. Specifically, we find that whites who perceive themselves to be on the losing side of politics are more likely to oppose government involvement in redistribution, but only when the comparison to non-whites is made explicit. The effects of racialized loser perceptions are robust to controls for previously identified predictors such as ideology, racial attitudes, and party affiliation. We discuss the implications of our results for the rise of support for right-wing populist movements that champion white protectionism. Our paper contributes to past research by testing the effect of cross-racial comparisons on changes in support for redistribution and demonstrates that even subtle changes in the way the comparison is framed can boost white Americans' anti-egalitarian positions on redistribution.
We implement a survey experiment to measure the effects of confirmation versus refutation frames in fact-checking wartime corrections. Respondents were presented with semantically equivalent statements that either confirmed accurate information (e.g., "It is TRUE that President Zelensky remained in Ukraine") or refuted its inaccurate version (e.g., "It is FALSE that President Zelensky left Ukraine"). We evaluate whether confirmation frames increase sharing behavior compared with refutation frames. We also test whether refutation frames elicit more negative sentiments-such as anger and disgust-while confirmation frames generate more positive emotional responses. The experimental design mimics a Facebook post and employs four randomized treatments that vary in framing (confirmation vs. refutation) and news source (The New York Times vs Fox News). The survey was administered to 2091 U.S. adults in May 2022.
Audience cost theory suggests that as a country increases its audience costs, it can send a credible threat to an opponent and prevail in an international crisis. Many experimental studies show that domestic citizens of a challenger state disapprove of a leader who backs down in a crisis, which constitutes evidence for audience costs. However, what about the audience's perception in the target country? Even if audience costs emerge in a threatening country, audiences in its adversary may not recognize this. If that is the case, audience costs do not function as costly signals. Additionally, the challenger's regime type may play an important role in how people perceive the emergence of audience costs. Our pre-registered survey experiment in the United States (N = 1404) finds that audiences in a target state correctly perceive the emergence of audience costs in a challenger state. However, we also find that the magnitude of perceived audience costs or threat credibility does not differ between a democratic and a dictatorial challenger. These findings suggest that leaders of both democratic and autocratic regimes can effectively tie their hands by increasing domestic audience costs.
