Public Opinion

New research challenges conventional understanding of public opinion dynamics.

Does agreement with the specific electoral procedures used affect whether voters trust election outcomes? Using public opinion data from 2008–2024 and a large pre-2024 election survey experiment, the author examines whether procedural agreement explains variation in confidence beyond the well-known effects of partisan control and whether a voter’s preferred candidate won. The study focuses on procedural polarization in state election laws and assesses observational and experimental evidence about how voters respond when results are produced under procedures they oppose.

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.

Does the public in a rising authoritarian power overestimate their country’s reputation, power, and influence? This research uses three studies conducted around and after the COVID-19 pandemic to document whether Chinese citizens overestimate China’s global reputation and soft power, and whether simple information about actual international opinion can correct those perceptions and influence related evaluations.

Public accusations of international law violations often trigger a rhetorical fight over responsibility and meaning. Political costs for accused governments depend less on the facts than on a contest of messages: governments try to reshape perceptions, while international organizations (IOs) push back to defend the law.

This study asks whether public attitudes toward autonomous weapons—and their sensitivity to contextual cues—are similar across countries. Using a preregistered survey experiment run in four countries, the authors compare how information about risk of misidentification and the identity of the target (terrorist group versus aggressive state) shifts acceptance of autonomous weapons. The paper's central contribution is a cross-national test of prior U.S.-focused experimental findings, reporting how these contextual primes operate in the United States, Brazil, Germany, and China.

This paper asks whether economic self-interest predicts revealed support for redistribution by examining votes on redistributive ballot initiatives rather than survey responses. Drawing on eight ballot initiatives across six American states, the authors report precinct-level evidence that precinct economic standing is systematically related to votes on redistribution and that class differences vary with local partisan composition.

This paper asks how voters form policy preferences in nonpartisan contexts by studying residential zoning reform. The author reports fieldwork on a Menlo Park, California zoning initiative and argues that local campaign messages combined ideological information with nonpartisan group cues. The paper then assesses generalizability by documenting similar information in other California zoning campaigns and conducting a survey experiment with Democratic homeowners to test how that information affects opinion.

This study asks whether preferences about who should decide abortion policy — the federal government or individual states — changed the way Americans translated support for reproductive health care into votes in the 2024 US presidential election. Using a novel set of survey questions about abortion generally, access to the abortion pill (mifepristone), and locus-of-authority preferences, the authors test whether those locus preferences conditioned vote choice for Donald Trump. They report only partial support for the expectation that state-versus-federal authority preferences meaningfully alter electoral responses on reproductive issues.

This research asks whether and how politicians’ public criticisms of information providers change which sources their supporters find credible and how that alters opinion formation. Using two linked survey experiments, the authors investigate whether elite discrediting of a news outlet leads partisans to avoid that outlet, view it as biased, and discount its subsequent coverage — processes the paper frames as an indirect means of elite influence over public opinion.

This article asks whether U.S. public willingness to use force to defend allies depends on allies’ own defense investments. Using four survey experiments on samples of the U.S. public, the author examines how information about improvements in allied military capabilities affects respondents’ support for U.S. intervention and the perceived need for U.S. action. The study contributes evidence about how alliance burden‑sharing shapes public opinion and the possible domestic constraints it creates for alliance bargaining.

Do Americans support investigations and prosecutions for war crimes when U.S. personnel are implicated? This study asks whether public support for the International Criminal Court (ICC) endures when investigations cover U.S. military and intelligence personnel in the ICC’s Afghanistan probe, and which argumentative frames shift that support. Using an online survey experiment, the authors test whether human-rights arguments increase support and national-interest arguments decrease it, then report overall levels of public backing while noting limits tied to timing and experimental conditions.

This study asks how acute external threats affect public attitudes toward military service under authoritarian rule, using original survey data collected in Iran before and after the April 13, 2024 missile exchange with Israel. The article compares responses across the two periods to examine whether a geopolitical shock increases support for coercive mobilization and for expanding military roles across gender boundaries. The author frames the contribution as evidence about how external threats may legitimize coercion and reconfigure gendered citizenship in contexts of regime distrust.

This study asks whether offering compensation to concentrated opponents can increase public support for politically difficult reforms. The authors present arguments for and against “buyouts” and then test public attitudes using survey experiments about three reform cases: phasing out coal energy, simplifying tax filing, and granting amnesty to dictators. They report that buyouts can attract majority support but that approval varies with partisanship and program design: buyouts directed to workers receive higher approval than those for firms. The abstract emphasizes that moral objections — a reluctance to reward actors who obstruct beneficial reforms — and a credibility problem (supporters’ willingness to renege on payments after reform) constrain the democratic viability of buyouts. The authors conclude that buyouts may make stalled reforms politically feasible, but their acceptability depends on careful institutional design and public perceptions.

This paper asks whether US economic sanctions during the Trump presidency reduced support for Iran’s government or instead produced a "rally-around-the-flag" effect among Iranian influencers and their audiences. Using a large-scale supervised machine-learning analysis of nearly two million tweets from more than 1,000 Iranian influencers, the authors compare reactions to comprehensive versus targeted sanctions and examine variation by political faction and by which entity was targeted.

This article asks how foreign state communications affect public attitudes about a concrete policy: whether China should be permitted to invest in nuclear power infrastructure in the United Kingdom. Using messaging derived from official Chinese news articles, the authors deploy a survey experiment to test whether publics respond differently to coercive versus persuasive signals, how perceptions of threat or economic dependence matter, and whether counter-coercion by close allies moderates effects. The contribution is an experimental test of strategic communication from a foreign state on a specific energy-investment policy question, with attention to conditional factors that might reduce or reverse messaging effects.

This article asks whether politician gender changes how voters judge political scandal, testing whether people discount or disbelieve scandals that contradict gender stereotypes. Using a survey experiment in Mexico that varied scandal type and the politician’s gender, the authors report that respondents were more favorable toward female politicians accused of stereotype-incongruent behaviors, and that people high in benevolent sexism were especially likely to discount stereotype-incongruent scandals. The piece aims to clarify the role of gender stereotypes in judgments about politicians’ fitness for office.

News coverage often signals the positions of party elites, but does exposure to those signals in everyday reporting actually shape public policy opinions? Prior experiments using artificial stimuli commonly find strong partisan cueing—partisans adopt leaders' stances—but real news typically offers richer policy information and more subtle or ambiguous cues that may not produce the same effects.

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 whether residents of Mosul, Iraq, prefer power-sharing or unilateral power-grabs for local policing after the Islamic State occupation, and how personal wartime victimization shapes those preferences. Using a survey experiment that varies which factions hold policing authority, the authors compare public expectations about security under power-sharing versus power-grabbing and test whether conflict exposure moderates support. The paper documents greater public support for power-grabbing in policing and distinct patterns among victims and nonvictims of conflict.

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.

This study asks whether local state action—specifically women’s police stations (WPS)—shapes citizens’ attitudes toward gender-based violence. Using evidence from Brazil, the authors examine whether the existence and duration of WPS in a municipality are associated with men’s rejection of violence and support for bystander intervention, and assess alternative explanations for those associations.

Does identity politics change how people view the rule of law and courts? This paper uses original survey experiments to examine whether Americans’ support for the rule of law and the institutional legitimacy of the Supreme Court depends on which groups benefit from judicial rulings. The study tests whether group identities condition acceptance of decisions, connecting contemporary polarization and tribalization to public views about legal institutions.

This study examines how ordinary citizens define terrorism following violent incidents. Despite ongoing public debates and political science frameworks, there's been little exploration into the average American's understanding of terrorism.

This paper asks how people form assumptions about who benefits from public policies and shows that concrete elements of policy design can change those assumptions. Using a pre-registered survey experiment, the author manipulates policy features (for example, whether a program includes a work requirement) and measures respondents’ assumptions about beneficiaries’ race and national origin and their policy evaluations. The study emphasizes that these design-driven assumptions influence policy attitudes even when respondents do not report stereotype-consistent beliefs.

This research asks whether two kinds of political rhetoric—sanitized language that obscures war casualties and dehumanizing language that devalues groups—shape public support for U.S. foreign interventions. Using two experiments, the author investigates whether these rhetorical strategies change emotional reactions and thereby shift people toward more hawkish foreign policy attitudes. The brief summarizes the research question, the experimental approach reported in the abstract, and the qualified findings the author presents about emotional mechanisms and attitude change.

Legislators represent through three lenses: personal views, promises made during campaigns, and the will of their constituents. While these sometimes align, they often conflict.

Worrying that political science ignores fiction is common, but we argue it's time for a genre-based approach. Focusing on popular dystopian narratives, results from three experiments show something surprising: they increase support for radical and violent political action.