Recent research suggests that a strong identity attachment to leisure activity affects the hobbyists’ political preferences and behavior. This paper further evaluates the claim that hobbyists – in this case, gamers – react differently to political stimuli that directly involve their hobby of choice. Using original survey experiment data, this paper shows that gamers become more interested in foreign trade policy when presented in the context of video games. This finding indicates that even seemingly apolitical identities matter in framing political behavior. Aspects of hobbyist identities seep into political attitudes, even if preferences in the strictest meaning of the word may take longer to form.

Many international organizations (IOs) rely on voluntary contributions from member states and private actors to fund their operations. Donations from individuals are a significant and increasing income source for these IOs, who rely on marketing strategies such as celebrity endorsement, in the form of Goodwill Ambassadors, to help raise funds. Little is known, however, about the effectiveness of this strategy in the context of IOs although intuition from literatures in marketing and psychology suggests that celebrity endorsement should be effective. We conduct a survey experiment to investigate the effectiveness of Goodwill Ambassadors and, contrary to expectations, find no average effect of celebrity endorsement on donations to, and interest in, IOs and only limited effects among certain sub-groups. We speculate that the context of IOs makes it harder to generate the type of connection between celebrity and cause necessary to make endorsement effective and suggest that further investigation is needed.

Every year, Americans elect hundreds of thousands of candidates to local public office, typically in low-attention, nonpartisan races. How do voters evaluate candidates in these sorts of elections? Previous research suggests that, absent party cues, voters rely on a set of heuristic shortcuts – including the candidate’s name, profession, and interest group endorsements – to decide whom to support. In this paper, we suggest that community embeddedness – a candidate’s roots and ties to the community – is particularly salient in these local contests. We present evidence from a conjoint survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of American voters. We estimate the marginal effect on vote share of candidate attributes such as gender, race, age, profession, interest group endorsements, and signals of community embeddedness – specifically homeownership and residency duration. We find that voters, regardless of political party, have strong preferences for community embeddedness. Strikingly, the magnitude of the residency duration effect rivals that of prior political experience.

Does the public apply a “double standard” for human rights abuses based on the perpetrator’s alliance status? Research shows that individuals are more supportive of military action against states that violate human rights. However, other studies claim that condemnations of violations are often contingent upon the strategic relationship with the perpetrators. In this paper, we bridge these different strands of literature by examining whether the effect of foreign states’ human rights practices on public support for war depends on the alliance status of the violator. To investigate this interaction, we conducted two preregistered experiments that independently randomized the state’s human rights practices and U.S. alliance status. Both experiments reveal that the alliance status of the human rights violator has a negligible effect on support for war. Consequently, our findings challenge the prevailing notion that the public applies a double standard for human rights violations.

Across countries, a gender gap exists with respect to attitudes toward leadership and political participation, with women scoring lower than men on measures of these outcomes. This gap emerges early in life and could be influenced by gender norms learned through socialization, in the family or at school. Using a natural experiment in high school assignment in South Korea, we examine whether an all-female school environment can contribute to narrowing the gender gap by increasing women’s civic and political participation and fostering their ambition for leadership. We find that female graduates of single-sex schools are more engaged in politics and society and more likely to pursue leadership positions compared to women who graduated from coeducational schools. These effects are durable, lasting for years, even decades. However, single-sex schools do not cultivate more progressive gender attitudes among women, so increased female participation need not imply greater activism for gender equality.

Text is a major medium of contemporary interpersonal communication but is difficult for social scientists to study unless they have significant resources or the skills to build their own research platform. In this paper, we introduce a cloud-based software solution to this problem: ReChat, an online research platform for conducting experimental and observational studies of live text conversations. We demonstrate ReChat by applying it to a specific phenomenon of interest to political scientists: conversations among co-partisans. We present results from two studies, focusing on (1) self-selection factors that make chat participants systematically unrepresentative and (2) a pre-registered analysis of loquaciousness that finds a significant association between speakers’ ideological extremity and the amount they write in the chat. We conclude by discussing practical implications and advice for future practitioners of chat studies.

Past research indicates that support for conservatism increases when individuals perceive threat to their group’s social status – i.e., prestige and respect. However, the causal link between status threat and increased electoral support for conservative candidates has not been established. Most prior studies rely on observational data, and it remains unclear how the effect of status threat on candidate support varies depending on the specific conservative policies adopted by candidates. Additionally, previous research has not fully addressed whether and how these effects are constrained by voters’ party loyalty. This article investigates these questions by conducting a joint experiment combining vignette and conjoint designs. White Americans were randomly exposed to status threat communication, and then choose between different hypothetical candidates with varying degrees of conservatism on various issues. The results show large effects of candidates’ issue positions and partisanship, but very little effect of status threat.