While political opposition to economic globalisation has increased, several governments have adopted stricter unilateral interventions in global supply chains in the name of sustainability, despite their potentially significant economic costs. We argue that these policy choices are partly driven by politicians’ incentives to align with domestic public opinion. In particular, new information disclosure rules enable governments to implement market access restrictions compliant with binding trade liberalisation commitments while (a priori) obscuring their costs to voters. We assess the latter argument with original survey data and experiments with representative samples from the twelve major OECD importing economies (N = 24,000). Indeed, citizens expect substantive benefits while discounting costs from these new regulations, resulting in majority support for rather stringent standards. We further observe that these relationships are muted in countries with high trade exposure. These findings suggest that governments may strategically implement unilateral policies with high-cost obfuscation to garner domestic voter support, driving regulatory proliferation in international economic relations.

Affective polarization among citizens is often attributed to the harsh rhetoric and personal attacks that politicians direct at one another. However, the influence of elite rhetoric on affective polarization may work in both directions. We theorize that politicians can reduce affective polarization by making positive or respectful statements about their political opponents. A preregistered survey experiment with 2,000 citizens provides strong support for this expectation. Politicians’ congenial messages about their opponents significantly reduce affective polarization on two distinct measures. Specifically, the experimental treatments reduce citizens’ negative emotions toward outpartisans, as well as their desire to socially distance themselves from such outpartisans. The depolarizing effect of such messages does not depend on the political alignment of either the politician or the citizen, nor does it necessarily require high levels of political trust.

Support for fundamental political rights is a defining feature of liberal democracy. Crises may undermine citizen support for these rights. Yet, existing research does not often distinguish support for ‘illiberal’ policies that encroach on fundamental political rights from other ‘intrusive’ crisis policy responses. By conducting a series of well-powered, preregistered conjoint and vignette experiments in the and the UK during the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we examine the extent to which citizens are willing to support policies that violate liberal democratic rights in a crisis as well as intrusive policies. Our results suggest that support for liberal democratic rights is quite robust, although endorsements by an in-group party or trusted expert can increase support for illiberal policies. Overall, we find noteworthy resistance to illiberal policy measures, such as postponing elections and banning protests, indicating popular commitment to liberal democratic norms.

People regularly get information about the political world in visual form, such as graphs of past economic growth, nonverbal cues from politicians, or projections of future climate change. Visual characteristics affect people’s preferences, but it is difficult to measure the extent of this effect precisely and concisely in surveys. We present a new adaptive design that measures the impact of visual characteristics on people’s preferences: The plot staircase. We apply it to graphs of time series data, identifying the effect of the slope of a sequence on evaluations of the sequence. The plot staircase replicates the existing finding that people have a strong preference for increasing trends. Using fewer survey questions than past approaches, it measures at the individual level how much overall welfare a survey respondent is willing to sacrifice for an increasing trend. We demonstrate the flexibility of the plot staircase across domains (economic growth, jobs creation, and the COVID-19 vaccine rollout) and across sequence characteristics. Survey measurement is more difficult for concepts that cannot be represented textually or numerically; our method enables researchers to measure preferences for graphical properties not reducible to the individual pieces of information.

Most people are concerned about climate change and want policymakers to address it. But how? To investigate which policy options are more versus less popular, with whom, and why, we collected data in four European countries on attitudes toward 16 policies: taxes, bans, regulations, and subsidies/spending. We argue that support for different policies should reflect perceptions of policies’ net costs, and that such perceptions are likely influenced by people’s political trust. We tested this expectation by randomly assigning survey respondents to read different versions of given policies and confirmed that individuals with low political trust, who are less supportive overall of most policies, are most sensitive to variation in implied costs. We argue this interaction effect is a previously untested implication of the influential theory that political trust operates as a heuristic, and it helps explain policies’ varying popularity, including the puzzle of why carbon taxes are highly unpopular.

Over the past twenty years, behavioural insights and nudges have gained prominence in public policy design. Public opinion research on this subject has largely considered two questions: (1) who supports nudges? and (2) where is support for nudges strongest? Using data from two nationally representative surveys fielded in 2023 and 2024 (N = 2020 and N = 1991), we take up these questions in Canada—a ‘principled pro-nudge’ country. We measure opinion toward 30 nudge policies across three policy domains—15 that provide a benchmark to other country studies, coupled with 15 that reflect policies that were implemented by Canadian nudge units. We also analyze open-ended responses to a question that asks what individuals think of nudging (if they think of them at all). We find that approval for nudges is high, with 71% of respondents supporting nudges that have been implemented in Canada. Second, we identify similar gender, ideological and identity-based patterns for support as observed in countries with different social and market structures. Third, analyzing open-ended responses that gauge respondents’ thoughts on BI, our findings highlight the complicated nature of public opinion toward BI, which includes optimism alongside uncertainty and skepticism.

Cet article tente de mesurer les changements possibles survenus dans la structure de l’opinion publique sur la question de l’indépendance du Québec. Plus particulièrement, nous comparons deux modèles théoriques qui ont été au coeur de notre compréhension des appuis à l’indépendance, soit le modèle du choix rationnel associé aux coûts-bénéfices prospectifs de l’indépendance et le modèle socio-psychologique qui met de l’avant les griefs et revendications que le Québec ressent face au régime canadien. Notre étude permet aussi d’évaluer la pertinence de ces modèles à travers les générations entre 2014 et 2024; et de considérer de nouveaux facteurs explicatifs contemporains. Dans l’ensemble, nos résultats suggèrent une surprenante stabilité quant à l’importance des différents facteurs considérés pour comprendre les mécaniques expliquant l’appui ou non à l’indépendance du Québec. Les attitudes populistes, nativistes et autoritaristes apportent aussi un pouvoir explicatif additionnel, quoique limité.

Solar geoengineering offers a speculative means to cool the planet by reflecting solar radiation into space. While some research suggests that awareness of solar geoengineering could reduce public support for decarbonization through a moral hazard mechanism, other studies indicate that it could serve as a “clarion call” that motivates further action. Using a pre-registered factorial design, we assess how sharing balanced information on solar geoengineering affects attitudes toward decarbonization policies and climate attitudes among 2,509 US residents. We do not find that solar geoengineering information affects support for decarbonization on average, though it may increase support among initially less supportive subgroups; moreover, this information tends to increase the perception that climate change is a daunting problem that cannot be resolved without decarbonization. Our results suggest that concerns about moral hazard should not discourage research on solar geoengineering – as long as the public encounters realistic messages about solar geoengineering’s role.

Longstanding public support for the Supreme Court of Canada is well-documented and contributes to its public legitimacy. However, the sources of this support and how vulnerable it may be to political factors or negative coverage of events are not well understood. In February of 2023, Justice Russell Brown took a leave of absence from the Supreme Court following a conduct complaint under review by the Canadian Judicial Council. Justice Brown retired from the bench in June of that year, before the CJC concluded its investigation. In the intervening period, media coverage of the events that prompted the attention from the CJC thrust the Court into the spotlight. Using data from an original two-wave survey experiment (n = 1,222) from May and November of 2023, we investigate whether perspectives toward the circumstances surrounding Brown’s retirement hurt perceptions of the Court’s legitimacy. We find that the event did not disrupt support for the Court over time but also point to the ways in which opinion toward the Court changed pre- and post-resignation. These findings suggest that support toward Canada’s high court is at present largely stable even in the case of negative coverage of a high-profile event. However, we also acknowledge the potential vulnerabilities that negative coverage of the Court may present.

Sceptics charge that ordinary citizens are not competent enough to sustain democracy. We challenge this assessment on empirical and theoretical grounds. Theoretically, we provide a new typology for assessing citizen competence. We distinguish the democratic values of reliability, accountability, and inclusive equality, mapping the different competencies implied by each. Empirically, we show that recent research, focused primarily on Americans but with some analogues in other regions, significantly undercuts common worries about citizen competence. We then delineate a solutions-oriented, theoretically-informed approach to studying citizen competence, one which would focus more on systemic rather than individual-level interventions.

The Viewpoint Alberta Consolidated Dataset is a novel resource for understanding political attitudes and behaviours in Alberta which includes over 10,000 interviews across nine waves in 5 years. The Viewpoint dataset combines both cross-sectional and longitudinal (panel) data on Albertans’ attitudes towards political parties, federalism, democracy, social movements, energy transitions, media and a range of issue areas. We demonstrate some of these potential applications in this note. To our knowledge, this dataset is the largest and most comprehensive dataset of political attitudes in a single province that has ever been publicly released. This matters because we know much less about provincial politics than national politics in Canada, despite many of the most interesting and important political developments taking place at the provincial level. Furthermore, by following the same respondents over multiple periods of time, we can develop a much greater understanding of individual-level changes across a range of key issue domains

What role does racial/ethnic diversity in the American states play in racialized partisan and partisan-ideological sorting? We expand the commonly employed empirical frame of Whites’ partisan and partisan-ideological reactions to minority groups at the national level by leveraging the variation in racial/ethnic populations in the American states and accounting for both out-group and in-group size across White, Black, Latino, and Asian respondents. Using the pooled 2012–22 Congressional Election Study, the results demonstrate that Whites tend toward Republican orientations in states with larger Black and Foreign-Born populations and display stronger partisan-ideological sorting in more diverse states with large Black, Latino, or Asian populations. The analyses also reveal that partisan-ideological sorting is asymmetrical along both racial and partisan identities. White partisan-ideological sorting across state racial/ethnic contexts is driven by both Republican and Democratic identifiers, while Black, Latino, and Asian respondents show few signs of elasticity to state context in partisan identity or partisan-ideological sorting. The asymmetries in both PID and partisan-ideological alignment lead to larger racial/ethnic gaps in attachment and alignment in more diverse state contexts. These are well-understood conditions for greater partisan and factional conflict and polarized party and electoral politics.

Despite ongoing affective polarization in the United States, support for Taiwan has somehow remained unscathed; Democrats and Republicans unanimously endorse US-Taiwan foreign policy. This is reflected both in public opinion surveys of American voters and support for Taiwan from elected officials. Theories of foreign policy and public opinion suggest that whether voters take top-down or bottom-up cues on foreign policy, we should expect some level of polarization on a salient issue like Taiwan. Utilizing two preregistered survey experiments in the United States, this study tests how robust bipartisan support for Taiwan persists when Taiwan is framed as either a Republican or Democratic issue. When presented as a partisan issue, do American voters still support Taiwan? Contrary to theoretical expectations, Taiwan presents a complex reality. Some foreign policy issues related to Taiwan can become partisan when framed along party lines while others remain bipartisan. Specifically, support for diplomatic and military policy may be affected by partisan framing, but support for economic policy remains bipartisan. This study contributes to theories of public opinion and foreign policy, particularly for scholars focused on US-Taiwan and US-China relations.