Political polarization has transcended political arenas, influencing personal decisions. While such biases are often ascribed to out-group animosity, a person’s “party tag” may act as a proxy for other characteristics, overstating partisanship’s role in private life. To explore this, we focus on online dating, using a conjoint experiment with 3,000 UK participants to isolate the effect of partisanship from other traits. Our findings indicate that the influence of partisanship is on par with conventional criteria like physical appearance, yet tolerance for opposing views plays an even stronger role. We also find imporant partisan asymmetries: both groups favour co-partisans, but Labour supporters are twice as likely to do so. Counter-stereotypic profiles reduce bias among Conservatives but heighten it among Labour supporters.

This article describes how and why propaganda affected recipients differently in two distinct situations, namely forced exposure and selective exposure, when they received propaganda during a series of six original survey experiments conducted in China. The prevailing view is that people are more likely to resist information they receive if their exposure to it is forced. But the study addressed in this article found that citizens who prefer not to view propaganda news, when given a choice, actually demonstrate higher average treatment effects on pro-regime attitudes compared to those who willingly read propaganda news (i.e. where participants in the control group were assigned a reading of non-propaganda news). Moreover, this study shows that participants who prefer not to read propaganda news exhibit higher average treatment effects when rating the issue presented in the news as more understandable and important—compared to those who willingly engage with the propaganda. That suggests a possible rationalization pathway in this phenomenon.1

How does anxiety influence voting behaviour? Whereas anxiety is usually treated as a unidimensional emotion, we highlight the multiplicity of socially contingent forms it can assume in response to societal threats. Different anxieties, we posit, can create distinct axes of political competition along which anxious voters exhibit widely varying preferences. We illustrate our argument with unique observational and experimental survey data from Spain’s COVID-19 crisis, showing that individuals anxious about the pandemic’s health consequences favoured parties advocating stringent lockdown restrictions, whereas individuals anxious about its economic disruption preferred parties opposing such measures. Analyzing municipality-level results from Madrid’s 2021 regional election, we additionally provide evidence that COVID-19 boosted support for pro-lockdown parties in areas more exposed to its health effects and support for anti-lockdown parties in areas more exposed to its economic impact. Our findings point to the importance of disaggregating complex emotional states for understanding the determinants of voting behaviour.

Emotions and their sociopolitical impact have received increasing scholarly attention. However, it remains largely unclear whether emotional expression within surveys is subject to social desirability bias. By drawing on impression management theory and the disclosure decision model, I argue that emotional expression is likely prone to social desirability bias in interviewer-administered survey modes and test my hypotheses on mixed-mode ANES data. The findings demonstrate that respondents significantly underreport negative emotions—anger and fear—when interviewed face-to-face as compared to online. Furthermore, positive emotions, such as hope and pride, are not exempt from biased reporting related to interview mode. These results highlight the risks of estimating emotions and their salience by either relying on interviewer administration or combining survey modes.

Past work on closed-ended survey responses demonstrates that inferring stable political attitudes requires separating signal from noise in “top of the head” answers to researchers’ questions. We outline a corresponding theory of the open-ended response, in which respondents make narrow, stand-in statements to convey more abstract, general attitudes. We then present a method designed to infer those attitudes. Our approach leverages co-variation with words used relatively frequently across respondents to infer what else they could have said without substantively changing what they meant—linking narrow themes to each other through associations with contextually prevalent words. This reflects the intuition that a respondent may use different specific statements at different points in time to convey similar meaning. We validate this approach using panel data in which respondents answer the same open-ended questions (concerning healthcare policy, most important problems, and evaluations of political parties) at multiple points in time, showing that our method’s output consistently exhibits higher within-subject correlations than hand-coding of narrow response categories, topic modeling, and large language model output. Finally, we show how large language models can be used to complement—but not, at present, substitute—our “implied word” method.

Many efforts to persuade others politically employ interpersonal conversations. A recurring question is whether the participants in such conversations are more readily persuaded by others who share their demographic characteristics. Echoing concerns that individuals have difficulties communicating across differences, research finds that individuals perceive demographically similar people as more trustworthy, suggesting shared demographics could facilitate persuasion. In a survey of practitioners and scholars, we find many share these expectations. However, dual-process theories suggest that messenger attributes are typically peripheral cues that should not influence persuasion when individuals are effortfully thinking, such as during interpersonal conversations. Supporting this view, we analyze data from eight experiments on interpersonal conversations across four topics (total N = 6, 139) and find that shared demographics (age, gender, or race) do not meaningfully increase their effects. These results are encouraging for the scalability of conversation interventions, and suggest voters can persuade each other across differences.

This study explores the impact of vulnerability appeals during the COVID-19 pandemic using a nationally representative, preregistered survey experiment (N = 4,087) conducted in mid-2021. We explore whether providing citizens with information about the vulnerability of ethnic minority and disabled citizens to COVID-19 fosters empathy and increased support for behavioral restrictions. We observe minimal statistically significant or substantive effects, although the presence of subtle effects cannot be entirely ruled out. We identify some limited indications that individuals with disabilities exhibit increased support for restrictions when exposed to information about the vulnerability of disabled people to COVID-19, but these effects are inconsistent. Therefore, our findings provide limited evidence to confirm or rule out that using vulnerability appeals alone is effective for influencing public attitudes toward behavioral restrictions. The findings point toward avenues for future research, including a closer examination of heterogeneous responses to public health messaging among population subgroups.

There is a long-standing interest in how the visual appearance of politicians predicts their success. Usually, the scope of such studies is limited by the need for human-rated facial features. We instead fine-tune pre-trained image classification models based on convolutional neural networks to predict facial features of 7,080 Danish politicians. Attractiveness and trustworthiness scores correlate positively and robustly with both ballot paper placement (proxying for intra-party success) and the number of votes gained in local and national elections, while dominance scores correlate inconsistently. Effect sizes are at times substantial. We find no moderation by politician gender or election type. However, dominance scores correlate significantly with outcomes for conservative politicians. We discuss possible causal mechanisms behind our results.

Although influential models of public opinion hold that group sentiments play an important role in shaping political beliefs, they often assume that group attitudes stem from socialization and are thus exogenous to politics. We challenge this assumption, arguing that group attitudes may themselves be the consequence of political views. Across three survey experiments that each uses a unique social group–issue pair, we consistently demonstrate that attitudes toward groups are influenced by information about the groups' policy views. These findings persist even when accounting for potential partisan signaling. Altogether, these results show that group sentiments should not be regarded as wholly exogenous to policy concerns and suggest that the use of group-based heuristics can be consistent with instrumental models of public opinion.

Many court observers have argued that judges are capable of avoiding the use of extraneous factors in decision-making. This study examines the influence of seemingly irrelevant heuristics on real-world courtroom proceedings. Drawing on theories from neighboring disciplines, I hypothesize that physically attractive attorneys have greater success in US federal court. Using a generalizable causal inference strategy and a dataset of over 1,000 cases and 3,000 votes, I find support for my expectations using multiple measures of attractiveness. These findings raise serious normative concerns about equality and underscore the need to adjust traditional models of judicial behavior to account for inherent biases.

Do advisers affect foreign policy and, if so, how? Recent scholarship on elite decision making prioritizes leaders and the institutions that surround them, rather than the dispositions of advisers themselves. We argue that despite the hierarchical nature of foreign policy decision making, advisers’ predispositions regarding the use of force shape state behavior through the counsel advisers provide in deliberations. To test our argument, we introduce an original data set of 2,685 foreign policy deliberations between US presidents and their advisers from 1947 to 1988. Applying a novel machine learning approach to estimate the hawkishness of 1,134 Cold War–era foreign policy decision makers, we show that adviser-level hawkishness affects both the counsel that advisers provide in deliberations and the decisions leaders make: conflictual policy choices grow more likely as hawks increasingly dominate the debate, even when accounting for leader dispositions. The theory and findings enrich our understanding of international conflict by demonstrating how advisers’ dispositions, which aggregate through the counsel advisers provide, systematically shape foreign policy behavior.

Survey researchers testing the effectiveness of arguments for or against policies traditionally employ between-subjects designs. In doing so, they lose statistical power and the ability to precisely estimate public attitudes. We explore the efficacy of an approach often used to address these limitations: the repeated measures within-subjects (RMWS) design. This study tests the competing hypotheses that (1) the RMWS will yield smaller effects due to respondents' desire to maintain consistency (the “opinion anchor” hypothesis), and (2) the RMWS will yield larger effects because the researcher provides respondents with the opportunity to update their attitudes (the “opportunity to revise” hypothesis). Using two survey experiments, we find evidence for the opportunity to revise hypothesis, and discuss the implications for future survey research.

Cet article étudie les attitudes des Québécois à l’égard des personnes assistées sociales. Il s'intéresse à la variation du niveau d'aide mensuel que les Québécois sont prêts à leur accorder en fonction du profil de prestataires. L'article vise plus spécifiquement à étudier l'influence de l'aptitude au travail en tant qu'heuristique de mérite structurant l'opinion des Québécois. Nos résultats indiquent que les Québécois sont d'avis que les prestataires de l'assistance sociale devraient recevoir des soutiens mensuels inférieurs à ce qu'ils considèrent être le revenu minimum nécessaire pour couvrir les besoins de base. L'opinion des Québécois quant au niveau adéquat d'aide devant être offerte aux personnes assistées sociales est aussi fortement structurée par la question de l'aptitude au travail et par la perception que les individus sont en contrôle de leur situation. Finalement, la notion d'aptitude au travail se distingue clairement d'une variété d'autres caractéristiques individuelles pouvant influencer les opinions des Québécois.