Survey Data

This article develops a theory of perceived victimhood and uses nationally representative survey data to identify two forms—an egocentric sense of being a victim and a system-directed blaming orientation. Both forms appear across partisan, ideological, and sociodemographic groups and correlate with candidate preferences and racial attitudes while remaining distinct from constructs like collective narcissism and relative deprivation. An experiment shows some campaign rhetoric can increase feelings of victimhood and change subsequent attitudes and behavior.

Political scientists are increasingly focused on how sexist attitudes shape vote choices and policy opinions. Current research uses a wide variety of items and scales to measure sexism, creating inconsistency and making comparison across studies difficult.

Why do age differences in voting appear strong in some countries but absent in others? The popular "youthquake" narrative treats youth voting as a broad, cross-national shift, yet age effects vary substantially across established democracies.

This study asks how voters respond to a political scandal when evidence of misconduct is both clear and attributable to a specific party, and whether those conditions limit partisan motivated reasoning. Using the unexpected release of a video tied to Britain’s Partygate scandal and a nationally representative survey fielded at that moment, the research examines changes in performance evaluations, party favorability, and vote intentions toward the involved governing party.

Many political scientists measure dispositions—like populism, conspiracism, racism, and sexism—using agree/disagree statements, but that format can produce acquiescence bias that inflates endorsement rates. This article asks how acquiescence affects criterion validity and evaluates common remedies. Drawing on 160 tests and an internal meta-analysis, the authors examine how bias changes estimated relationships between constructs and assess balanced scales and measurement models as potential solutions. They end with design advice and recommendations for redesigning several popular measures of political and psychological dispositions.

A June 2019 national survey asks how Americans view the relationship between civilian leaders and the military. The authors find two main takeaways: respondents are unusually deferential to the military on when force should be used and comfortable with high-ranking officers intervening in public policy debates; and opinions about civil–military relations are shaped by partisan alignment, with Republicans less deferential and Democrats more willing to see the military as a check when their party opposes the president.

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.

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.

This study asks whether citizens in a target country perceive audience costs in a threatening challenger state and whether the challenger’s regime type (democracy vs. dictatorship) affects that perception. Using a pre-registered survey experiment conducted in the United States, the authors test whether audiences abroad recognize that a leader who would suffer domestic backlash for backing down can send a more credible threat.

This study asks how communication shapes the uptake of expert-produced information by decision-makers in spatial (land-use) planning. The authors contribute a mixed-method investigation of Italian regional lawmakers and local decision-makers, examining whether and how accessible language, formats and channels affect understanding and legislative behavior when documents are technical and highly specialized.

This study asks whether respondents’ Big Five personality traits predict their propensity to complete surveys, and how such nonresponse could bias estimated links between personality and political behavior. Using a new data collection effort and replication data, the author reports that Agreeableness and Neuroticism are associated with systematic differences in survey completion and shows how these patterns can alter observed relationships between the Big Five and political behavior. The brief highlights a methodological caution for researchers who use very brief personality inventories in political science.

This study develops a theory of pigmentocratic executive approval that links skin color–based group attachments to differences in skin tone between citizens and their leaders. The theory predicts two related dynamics: (1) deviations in skin tone between citizens and the incumbent reduce approval most strongly for citizens who are lighter than the leader, and (2) citizens whose skin tone is lighter than the executive will punish incumbents more harshly for poor economic performance.

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 study asks whether monuments to victims of authoritarian regimes — specifically Stolpersteine in Germany — can promote greater tolerance. Using a pre-registered survey experiment that exposed respondents to pictures of Stolpersteine, the authors examine emotional reactions and several attitudinal and quasi‑behavioral tolerance measures. The paper’s central contribution is evidence about immediate emotional responses to this form of victim commemoration and how those responses relate to measured tolerance.

This article asks whether differences in local agricultural competitiveness help explain the growing political divide between rural and urban voters. The authors propose that where agriculture is uncompetitive, rural voters are more likely to support protectionist parties and policies because agriculture remains central to local economic and social life; where agriculture confers a comparative advantage, the rural–urban cleavage should be weaker. The paper reports cross-national and subnational analyses that test this comparative-advantage argument while qualifying its claims with multiple data sources and designs.

This paper asks whether political factors—especially perceptions that older generations dominate politics or that one is personally excluded because of age—are associated with ageism toward older people. Using original survey data from Italy, South Korea, and the United States, the authors examine links between two kinds of political grievance (general concerns about older generations’ political dominance and personal feelings of age-based exclusion) and both explicit and implicit measures of ageism.

Where formal state authority is limited, local leaders often drive political mobilization — but why are some leaders more effective than others? This study introduces the concept of encompassing authority: how widely individuals perceive a leader as influencing multiple domains of their lives. Using original survey data from Zambia’s 2021 elections, the authors compare religious leaders, chiefs, and local councillors and test whether encompassing authority predicts mobilization beyond leader traits and voter characteristics.

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.

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 article asks whether three different justification framings for a road traffic emission trading system (ETS)—energy independence, economic resilience, and efficient climate mitigation—change public acceptance depending on people’s party preference and their level of political trust. Using an online survey experiment in Finland, the authors examine how framing effects vary across supporters of different parties and among respondents with high versus low political trust, and report that framing effects are conditional rather than uniform.

How does asset mobility affect the provision of property rights, and whose preferences matter? This research note develops a formal model that highlights how owners of more mobile assets may have weaker incentives for property‑rights enforcement, and how asset mobility can alter competitive dynamics among heterogeneous firms. Amy Pond evaluates these model implications using survey data from business executives in Latin America and cross‑national, time‑series evidence on firm profits, aiming to reconcile literatures on firm heterogeneity and property‑rights development.

This paper asks how state-led population displacement shapes long-run political identities, using the historical relocation of Pashtun communities under Emir Abd al‑Rahman in Afghanistan as a case study. The authors reconstruct where tribes were moved and connect those historical settlements to contemporary locations, then analyze novel microlevel survey data to compare political attitudes and identity among coethnic Pashtun communities separated by the resettlement. Their central contribution is evidence on whether and how a state-building resettlement campaign produced durable, regionally rooted political attachments.

This article asks how the social backgrounds of participants in 2019 Fridays for Future (FFF) protests across European cities related to who joined the protests and to protesters' strategic beliefs about how to address climate challenges. Using unique protest survey data collected at FFF events, the authors examine variation in participants' socioeconomic profiles and whether those backgrounds shaped preferences for institutions and approaches to climate and environmental action. The contribution is a nuanced account that rejects single-story portrayals of protesters as uniformly privileged or uniformly poor and highlights links between social composition and movement strategic orientations.

This article asks whether living through elections that unseat heads of government — “electoral turnovers” — affects citizens’ long-term support for democracy. Using a large merge of international surveys and historical election records, the author traces how many turnovers each respondent experienced across their life and uses cohort comparisons to estimate whether exposure predicts democratic support. The contribution is a broad, cross-national assessment that highlights how recent and repeated turnovers, especially after long incumbencies, relate to higher reported support for democracy.

This article asks whether culture—understood as interconnected “cultural scripts” linking group identities to negative phenomena—helps explain rises in antisemitism. Using three linked studies, the authors isolate a script that historically links Judaism with disease, document an increase in antisemitic attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic among Christian believers, and use association tasks and priming experiments to show that elements of the script are present and can be triggered in respondents’ minds.

This article asks how voters who hold progressive and conservative attitudes across economic and cultural issues—so-called cross-pressured voters—resolve those tensions in Western Europe, and what that means for mainstream parties. Using the growing share of cross-pressured voters as a lens, the study argues there is a stable asymmetry in mass attitudes: having progressive views on both dimensions often associates with left support, but being conservative on at least one dimension tends to push voters to the right. The brief preserves the article’s framing and evidence without extending claims beyond the original abstract.

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 presents two complementary datasets mapping the Italian political class: a census-style dataset of individual-level characteristics for more than 20,000 elected representatives across levels of government, and a large survey of sitting politicians’ attitudes collected between September 2020 and January 2021. The combined resource aims to support research on democratic representation by documenting who holds office in Italy and how those officeholders view elections, participation, public opinion and policy issues.

This study asks whether localized economic hardship affects civilians’ willingness to support peace-building measures—specifically reintegrating former combatants. Using individual-level survey responses about support for Taliban reintegration and exploiting variation from the 2015 Hindu Kush earthquake, the authors examine whether damage to local economic sectors changed civilians’ attitudes toward reintegration. The contribution is a focused test of how sectoral economic impacts of a sudden shock map onto public support for conflict cessation.

De-identification—removing names and direct identifiers—has long been the standard way to share survey data. Recent work shows these procedures do not stop intentional re-identification attacks, creating a real risk for large survey programs in academia, government, and industry. This risk is especially acute in political science because respondents’ political beliefs are among the most sensitive information they provide.

This paper tests Margaret Canovan’s influential argument that populism emerges from a tension between what she called democracy’s pragmatic and redemptive faces. Using cross-national survey evidence, the authors evaluate whether indicators of pragmatic politics reduce (or increase) support for populist parties and movements, offering one of the first empirical assessments of Canovan’s theoretical claim.

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 whether citizens in consolidated European democracies have become less supportive of democracy and whether any decline is widespread or concentrated in specific age groups or countries. Using new cross‑national survey evidence from 18 European countries (1981–2018), the authors disentangle age, cohort and period effects and report results from pre‑registered analyses to reduce selective reporting. The paper documents continued overall endorsement of self‑governance, while identifying country‑specific signs that some younger cohorts express weaker forms of democratic support.

This article delivers the first systematic, comparative look at how elites and citizens view the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Legitimacy beliefs were measured for six key IOs across five countries: Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, and the United States. The study compares public opinion and multiple elite groups to assess where and how perceptions diverge.

New research explores how voter-endorsed withdrawals from international institutions like Brexit influence public opinion abroad. Using survey data from 58,959 EU-27 Europeans and 2,241 Swiss voters collected during key political moments, the analysis finds both encouragement and deterrence effects.

This study asks whether high school civic education influences voter turnout in adulthood by merging detailed academic transcript information on social studies and civics coursework with a large-scale, longitudinal survey of a nationally representative cohort of adolescents. The authors present a sequence of regression models: initial specifications show apparent associations between civics coursework and later turnout, but the associations shrink after adding individual and family controls and disappear in family fixed-effects models that compare siblings. The analysis concludes that any causal effect of high school civic instruction on adult voting is at best very small, and the study finds no evidence that courses emphasizing service learning, civic skills, or political issues increase turnout.

This research asks whether moving local production abroad (offshoring) affects electoral outcomes for incumbent government parties. Using a difference-in-differences approach and an original Spanish survey, the author studies municipalities where a local plant relocated production abroad and compares electoral outcomes to municipalities without such events. The paper's central contribution is evidence that voters punish incumbent government parties in places that experienced offshoring, with larger vote declines where more jobs were lost and distinct patterns in coalition governments.

This study asks whether distance between party and voter on EU positions affects party support, and whether the effect depends on how salient EU politics are. Focusing on the party–voter dyad, the authors analyze patterns of EU issue voting in first-order national elections in five countries (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands) between 2017 and 2018, combining CHES, public opinion surveys, and Twitter data to construct distance and salience measures. The article reports that EU party positions appear to influence voting preferences and that EU salience moderates that relationship, while preserving the article’s stated qualifications about scope and measurement.

Multiple imputation is a widely used, principled approach for handling missing values but often breaks down on very large or complex datasets. MIDAS (Multiple Imputation with Denoising Autoencoders) offers an accurate, fast, and scalable alternative by adapting a class of unsupervised neural networks—denoising autoencoders—to the imputation task.

This research reassesses the validity of standard American National Election Study scales used to measure ideological positions.

Which factors influence how voters evaluate policy responses to economic shocks from natural disasters? This paper uses an original survey experiment among American citizens to test three fairness-based explanations—affectedness, need, and political ties—and compares those stated preferences to observed disaster-relief allocations from 1993–2008. The central contribution is a combined experimental and observational assessment that links mass preferences over distributional fairness to actual allocation patterns, while preserving the authors’ qualifications.

This article examines the relative impact of religiosity and personality traits on political ideology. Through comprehensive analysis, it demonstrates that religious factors hold greater explanatory power than individual characteristics when accounting for ideological positioning.

This paper asks why ethnic voting varies across localities and proposes a theory that local ethnic geography increases ethnic voting where minority-group voters fear intimidation from majority-group neighbors. The authors test this mechanism using Afrobarometer survey data for Ghana, combined with geocoded survey locations and demographic data, and compare intimidation beliefs against an alternative mechanism based on local public goods provision.

Using the 2016 American National Election Study, the authors examine how Americans’ perceptions of immigrant threat and the strength of their American identity jointly relate to vote choice in the 2016 presidential election. Grounded in social identity theory, the paper tests whether perceptions of immigrant threat are more likely to translate into support for Donald Trump among those with stronger American identity, and conversely whether American identity’s effects on vote choice are activated by threat perceptions. With survey data from ANES, the authors report that immigrant-threat perceptions and American identity magnify each other’s effects: threat perceptions have larger associations with support for Trump among respondents with stronger American identity, and American identity has stronger associations with vote choice when respondents perceive greater immigrant threat.

New research uncovers a surprising pattern in measuring support for violent extremism: over time, responses tend to shift toward alignment with local political power due to the Grapevine Effect. This phenomenon occurs as participants hear about the study and alter their answers out of fear of retribution.

The study examines how antipetismo—the Brazilian rejection of the Workers’ Party—expanded into a broader antipartisanship that targeted a wider set of parties and became associated with political intolerance. The core question is whether this generalized antipartisanship helps explain support for Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s 2018 presidential election.

Does heightened party competition translate into more political activism?

This article explores how partisanship influences citizens' memories for past political events. Analyzing retrospective evaluations across seven decades, it demonstrates that partisan identity shapes not only current opinions but also recollections of history.

This study examines attitudes toward public opinion surveys among Arab populations using original data from Qatar. Unlike previous research, it discovers a new dimension reflecting perceived survey intentions.

Facebook ads are widely used by political scientists for targeted survey recruitment, promising precision in reaching specific demographics. However, this new research reveals a stark reality: these ads frequently miss their intended targets. Using six surveys and 20 ad campaigns, the study demonstrates that targeting success rates range from just 23% to nearly 99%. Importantly, self-reported demographic groups and broader geographic areas showed higher accuracy in reaching desired audiences compared to specific location-based targets.

The entry of radical parties into parliament leads voters toward ideological extremes. A panel study of Dutch voters confirmed immediate polarization after the 2002 election following a radical-right party's rise to power.

Subnational analyses of political preference are crucial for understanding policy dynamics and causal effects within the European Union. However, reliable estimates have been difficult due to a lack of adequate regional data sources. This paper leverages Eurobarometer survey data—a rich source typically designed for national-level insights—to address this gap.

This study explores how racial resentment connects to political ideology.

This article reexamines how mass shootings affect public support for gun control policies.

Why do voters support far-right parties?

This study explores U.S. natives' attitudes toward immigrants by examining attribute affinity—how individuals evaluate immigrant groups based on perceived shared characteristics.

Multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP), the current gold standard, faces limitations in extrapolating survey data to smaller geographic units. This paper proposes BART-based methods—specifically Bayesian Additive Regression Trees for Prediction (BARP)—which offer significant advantages through advanced nonparametric regularization techniques.

Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Americans' opinions on health policy were largely driven by symbolic politics. However, this new analysis questions whether self-interest becomes more significant when faced with costly actions under the ACA.

Recent studies show political socialization shapes public foreign policy preferences, but this hasn't been explored outside democratic Western contexts. This research note examines Vietnamese attitudes toward Chinese economic expansion through the lens of Doi Moi (renovation), a transformative period distinct from prior experiences.

Data come from a recent online survey that used instructed-response items (so-called trap questions) to identify inattentive respondents. These items flag participants who fail to follow simple instructions embedded in the instrument.

Surveys often misstate how frequently people engage in socially desirable behaviors, and the American National Election Study (ANES) has long overstated voter turnout. The face-to-face component of the 2012 ANES produced a turnout estimate at least 13 percentage points higher than the benchmark voting-eligible population turnout rate, but the reasons for this persistent bias have been unclear.

This article presents an exchange-theoretic perspective on national pride, positing that it fundamentally depends on access to political power.

New research questions the long-held belief that public backlash hinders policy gains for marginalized groups like gays and lesbians. This article examines backlash against gay rights using online experiments, natural studies on marriage equality, and large-sample survey data.

Local human rights organizations (LHROs) play a central role as intermediaries for citizens and advocates for police and justice reform. Public trust is essential for LHROs to be effective. This study asks whether crime reduces that trust—creating a “rights trap” that undermines LHRO legitimacy and prompts government retrenchment—or increases it, producing a “rights amplifier” that strengthens rights observance.

Foreign policy belief systems have been studied extensively, but nearly all work focuses on Western democracies—chiefly the United States. The current security environment raises the question of whether elites in other regional powers hold foreign policy views with a similar internal structure. This article investigates that question for India, examining variance, structure, and shared elements in elite opinion.

Survey questions that ask who will win an election are common, but they capture winners rather than the underlying vote shares. This study compares that standard qualitative approach with a simple alternative: asking respondents to predict candidates' vote shares.

This study applies joint scaling methods to comparable items from three large-scale surveys to place voters, parties, and politicians from multiple Latin American countries onto a single, common ideological space. The common-space approach enables direct comparison of political actors across disparate surveys and national contexts.

The anti-prejudice norm and the motivation to comply with it significantly influence political preferences among majority populations, argues this research. Existing studies often overlook these internalized social pressures against minority bias. This paper introduces measures capturing such motivations and demonstrates they affect voting behavior through experiments and surveys in Britain and Germany. The findings support a dual-process model: while negative stereotypes may exist, contextual signals can activate individuals' better angels to act against prejudice.

This study investigates the extent of elite influence on public opinion within democratically informed electorates.