Survey Experiments

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 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 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.

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.

Do citizens favor the use of force less often against countries that share their ideological orientation? This article tests a domestic–international nexus beyond the democratic peace: the authors propose a “left‑wing peace” and a “right‑wing peace,” where respondents are less willing to use force against foreign states that match their own left‑ or right‑wing ideology. The study argues this pattern arises from out‑group bias and that rising polarization amplifies the effect.

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 article asks whether voter bias helps explain the near absence of politicians who are publicly HIV-positive. Using original nationally representative survey experiments in the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, the authors estimate how voters respond to hypothetical candidates with HIV and explore explanations for any observed penalty.

Participants in online surveys and experiments are often inattentive, which can undermine substantive and causal inferences. Many practitioners therefore include multiple factual or instructional closed-ended manipulation checks to identify low-attention respondents. Closed-ended checks are binary (correct or incorrect), which makes them easier to guess and limits variation in measured attention.

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.

How do Chinese citizens respond to government rhetoric during international crises? This study uses two scenario-based survey experiments—one hypothetical and one that reminds respondents of recent events—to examine the impact of government statements and propaganda on approval for China's territorial and maritime policies.

Many studies of causal mechanisms in survey experiments estimate indirect effects by conditioning on nonrandomized variables. That approach relies on a “selection-on-observables” assumption, which undermines the central advantage of random assignment and raises concerns about the validity of mediation claims.

There is growing interest in experiments where outcomes are measured by surveys while treatments are delivered separately (e.g., mailers, door‑to‑door canvasses, phone calls, or online ads). Common designs for these studies are often prohibitively expensive, vulnerable to bias, and raise ethical concerns.

This article evaluates Google Consumer Surveys (GCS) as a low-cost option for rigorous social science. The platform’s relative strengths and weaknesses make it most useful for researchers who identify causality through randomization to treatment groups rather than through selection on observables. The real cost advantage of GCS over alternatives is largely confined to short surveys with only a few questions.

Published findings can be compromised when researchers fail to report and adjust for multiple testing. Preregistration and preanalysis plans are proposed remedies, but critics worry these rules could hinder inductive learning. Without clear knowledge of how often researchers underreport design features, it is difficult to weigh the costs and benefits of such institutional reforms.

American politics traditionally focuses representation on policy responsiveness alone. But this paper argues that legislators rely on four dimensions—policy, service, allocation, and descriptive—to secure reelection.

This paper asks whether and how state actors in autocracies use messages about problems in established democracies to make democracy itself seem less attractive. Rex Weiye Deng studies a tactic he terms "propaganda of democratic flaws," combining large-scale text analysis of official posts on Chinese social media with two original survey experiments in China to examine whether amplifying foreign democratic problems affects people’s evaluations of democratic systems and of their own regime.

This study asks whether bipartisan American support for Taiwan holds when Taiwan is framed as a Republican or Democratic issue. Using two preregistered survey experiments in the United States, the paper tests how partisan framing alters public support for different types of US policy toward Taiwan. The contribution is a qualified, issue-specific account: some Taiwan-related policies shift with partisan framing while others do not.