Which actor identities and social or political cleavages shape public opinion on human rights violations? Building on social identity theory and moral typecasting theory, the research tests the relative impact of multiple identity characteristics on how Americans respond to alleged abuses.
Attitudes toward immigration are often attributed to effects on native wages and employment as well as to cultural and social concerns, but these influences are difficult to separate empirically. This study uses a contrast between two types of labor migrants—those who take up residence and work in the country versus those who commute across an international border—to hold labor‑market competition constant while varying cultural and social exposure.
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping labor markets and sparking political debates. Like economic globalization, AI promises benefits—job creation and lower prices—but also imposes costs such as job displacement. This research asks whether AI will trigger the same kinds of backlash as globalization by examining how people weigh the trade-offs between job outcomes and price changes.
This study investigates how public concern that immigration increases crime shapes electoral politics. Existing research credits an educational realignment for a growing left–right split on immigration. The argument here is different: leftist voters can be more conservative on immigrant crime than leftist parties, and that voter–party mismatch can drive highly educated progressives (so-called cosmopolitans) toward right-wing parties.
To what extent do citizens prefer living in a democracy over other markers of good governance or personal well-being? This study tests whether people trade off democratic institutions for outcomes such as safety, wealth, or access to services.
Many governments and organizations invest in voter education to increase women's political representation. However, in single-member district contests where clientelism pushes voters to back the most viable candidates, messages that spotlight discrimination against women can unintentionally undercut support by signaling lower electability. Messages that emphasize women candidates' electoral viability and political successes are expected to be more effective.
Citizens often enable corruption by paying bribes, yet even in highly corrupt settings only a minority always pay. This study asks why individuals choose to bribe in some situations but not others by combining insights from two major literatures on corruption.
This research uses conjoint experiments conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom to test whether voters discriminate against candidates with disabilities. Candidates were presented with attributes that varied, including the presence of physical or sensory impairments, and respondents chose between competing profiles.
This research tests whether national polarization over policing changes local politics by making police union endorsements into ideological signals that shape voter choices.
This article asks whether apparent attribute effects in candidate choice reflect unobserved masking (inference about missing information) or genuine lexicographic preferences (respondents treating one attribute as dominant). The authors propose an empirical test that uses conjoint experiments to distinguish between the two explanations and illustrate the approach with data on gender, race, and party; they also report a preregistered replication.
Biometric electronic ID programs (eIDs) are being rolled out across the Global South to improve citizen‑state legibility and government efficiency. These programs also raise privacy concerns—especially among groups with a history of mistrust in the state. If concerns about increased legibility change uptake or political behavior, eID programs could deepen existing social inequalities.
The idea that Americans routinely shun or “cancel” disagreeable speakers is widespread. This study measures how common such sanctioning really is, what motivates it, and how people perceive others’ willingness to cancel.
This study tests whether candidate qualifications can win over out-group voters in Afghanistan. An original conjoint experiment was embedded in a face-to-face survey conducted in three Afghan provinces between 2016 and 2017 with over 2,400 respondents.
This paper asks whether voters are more tolerant of politicians’ undemocratic behavior when those politicians share voters’ partisanship or policy preferences. Using conjoint experiments run in five countries (United States, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Mexico, South Korea), the study contrasts a social‑psychological partisan‑attachment account with Downsian spatial policy‑preference expectations to see which, if either, reduces voters’ punishment of undemocratic conduct.
Conventional wisdom in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) predicts a male advantage at the polls driven by sexism. A large-scale conjoint experiment overturns that expectation: voters in six Arab countries are more likely to support female candidates and rate them as more capable, even in stereotypically male domains.
A test of whether conjoint analysis can elicit more honest survey responses by reducing social desirability bias (SDB) on sensitive attributes.
This study asks how members of the US public understand rape and whether they think particular incidents deserve reporting or severe punishment. The authors offer an empirical conceptualization of "rape culture" and use experimental tools to test how incident attributes shape public judgments about punishability. Their contribution is to show, within a qualified experimental design, that features related to victims' consent and credibility matter for whether people support reporting to police or recommending severe sanctions.
This study asks how punishment of corruption shapes public support under authoritarian rule and tests two mechanisms: that punishment signals government capacity (instrumental) and that it signals moral commitment (deontological). Using an experimental mediation design embedded in a series of conjoint experiments in China, the authors present individual-level evidence about citizens’ evaluations of local officials who punish corrupt subordinates.
New research reveals how voter discrimination impacts the election of ethnic minority candidates in the UK, affecting both descriptive representation (who is elected) and substantive representation (what policies are supported). Using a conjunct experiment with British voters, this study finds that while white voters penalize Pakistani Muslim candidates for their ethnicity alone, they support black Caribbean candidates equally to white ones. However, black Caribbean candidates face "conditional discrimination," meaning their support drops when they advocate pro-minority policies.
This article asks how votes in sovereignty referendums translate into policy preferences about future outcomes and influence perceptions of legitimacy, using the 2016 British EU membership referendum as a case. The authors contribute by measuring how different possible Brexit negotiation outcomes were evaluated by the public and whether the referendum result provided clear guidance about what voters would prefer and regard as legitimate.
Conjoint analysis measures multidimensional preferences by estimating the average marginal component effect (AMCE) — the causal effect of a single profile attribute averaged over the other attributes. The AMCE, however, depends critically on the distribution used for that averaging. Most experiments default to a uniform distribution that weights every profile equally, but real-world profile frequencies and theoretically relevant counterfactual distributions are often far from uniform. This mismatch can seriously undermine the external validity of conjoint findings.
Party elites play a pivotal role in shaping parliamentary composition, yet their candidate preferences remain poorly understood. This study uses data from a conjoint experiment involving party delegates selecting candidates for five German parties across three state elections.
Understanding Chileans' views on democratic features is crucial as they shape a new constitution. This Research Note employs conjunct experiments with large quota samples to examine their preferences, finding distinct but largely uniform opinions across demographic groups regarding key aspects of democracy currently under debate in Chile's reform. The findings offer insights into ongoing constitutional processes and lessons for other democracies navigating similar reforms.
Does a party's ideology affect its standing among voters? This study suggests that ideological moderation enhances perceived competence. We find that parties leaning left or right are viewed as less willing to compromise and more prone to simplistic solutions, reducing their appeal for competence.
Conjoint survey designs are now common tools for studying decision-making, but a practical question arises for researchers: how many choice tasks can respondents do before satisficing meaningfully reduces response quality?
Most studies of candidate race assume that the way race is signaled—by a label/name or by a photo—does not meaningfully change results. That assumption goes largely untested. This study asks whether signaling candidate ethnicity with ethnic labels and names produces different effects than signaling ethnicity with ethnically identifiable photos and names.