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Petitions, as one of the most popular forms of political participation, offer citizens a bottom-up, comparatively low effort means to communicate their wishes to politicians and the public. This article analyses all steps of the petitions process to assess whether it provides all citizens with equal opportunities for participation as well as for realising political voice, with a particular focus on the role of online petitions and the German Bundestag. By surveying hundreds of petitioners--both those using traditional paper petitions and those who use the Internet to submit a petition--along with a representative survey of the population, this study confirms the traditional sociodemographic biases in participation. Online petitions attract younger people and support realising voice through recruiting supporters but do not offer more equality in participation. While the Petition Committee of the Bundestag does not treat certain groups of petitioners preferentially, those submitting petitions on paper have better chances for realising political voice. Overall only a few citizens feel they have realised political voice through their petition, resulting in widespread dissatisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What theories explain variation in public opinion toward asylum seekers? We implement a survey experiment in which a representative sample of German residents evaluates vignettes of asylum seekers, which randomly vary attributes that speak to deservingness, economic and religious threat, and gender considerations of attitude formation. We find strong support for deservingness theories. Economic and religious threat theories also receive empirical support. Gender plays a negligible role. Importantly, we also document that economic and—to a lesser extent—religious threat considerations only matter when respondents evaluate economic refugees. By contrast, political refugees are welcomed nearly unconditionally. Our paper thus replicates key findings from Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner (2016) and Czymara and Schmidt-Catran (2016) using a representative sample and points to an important interaction effect in public opinion formation toward asylum seekers: economic threat only gets activated when refugees' deservingness is in doubt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time response (RTR) measurement is an important technique for analyzing human processing of electronic media stimuli. Although it has been demonstrated that RTR data are reliable and internally valid, some argue that they lack external validity. The reason for this is that RTR measurement is restricted to a laboratory environment due to its technical requirements. This paper introduces a smartphone app that 1) captures real-time responses using the dial technique and 2) provides a solution for one of the most important problems in RTR measurement, the (automatic) synchronization of RTR data. In addition, it explores the reliability and validity of mobile RTR measurement by comparing the real-time reactions of two samples of young and welleducated voters to the 2013 German televised debate. Whereas the first sample participated in a classical laboratory study, the second sample was equipped with our mobile RTR system and watched the debate at home. Results indicate that the mobile RTR system yields similar results to the lab-based RTR measurement, providing evidence that laboratory studies using RTR are externally valid. In particular, the argument that the artificial reception situation creates artificial results has to be questioned. In addition, we conclude that RTR measurement outside the lab is possible. Hence, mobile RTR opens the door for large-scale studies to better understand the processing and impact of electronic media content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]