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Democracy requires voters to hold politicians accountable for violating democratic norms. Events surrounding Donald Trump have shown how partisanship can interfere with this process. While Trump has been accused of violating democratic norms, Republicans have opposed efforts to hold him accountable. Using a survey experiment, we explore the conditions under which Republican voters might become more willing to hold Trump accountable for violating democratic norms. We focus on whether Republicans can be convinced by members of their own party that Trump should be held accountable. Our research thus speaks to whether Republican voters might be receptive to appeals from Republican elites like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney who have criticized Trump. We find more evidence than prior work that Republicans are receptive to appeals from co-partisans who are critical of Trump's behavior. However, our overall finding is that co-partisan appeals are not highly effective at changing Republicans' views of Trump. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do perceptions of abuse in social insurance programs undercut program support? Answering this causal question is difficult because perceptions of program abuse can arise from multiple potential causes. Examining the case of disability insurance, we circumvent this challenges using laboratory experiments to study the interplay between program abuse and program support. Specifically, we test whether participants vote to reduce benefit levels when they observe program abuse, even if that abuse is not directly costly to them. We use a labor market shock to induce program abuse and show that the observation of a healthy worker receiving benefits causes workers who are unaffected by the shock to vote to lower benefits. This effect arises only when reducing benefit levels also reduces taxes. Our results demonstrate a causal link between program abuse and diminished support for social insurance, validating accounts that stress how violations of cooperative norms can undercut socially beneficial government programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns about the deservingness of policy beneficiaries appear to explain skepticism about redistributive social assistance programs. Many social insurance programs, despite requiring beneficiaries to pay in ahead of time, require discretionary evaluations of the merits of claims for benefits. Do perceptions of deservingness also affect attitudes toward these discretionary social insurance programs? Examining the politics of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), a program whose size and beneficiaries have been increasingly politicized, we investigate these questions by analyzing novel survey data and two experiments conducted on national surveys. We show that people use information about a beneficiary's eligibility-determining impairment—but not their race, which prior work argues is a key heuristic—to infer their deservingness. Moreover, support for SSDI is responsive to policy arguments emphasizing the program's social insurance features and potential abuse. Our findings demonstrate important psychological processes relevant to the contemporary politicization of social insurance programs involving discretionary eligibility rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial discrimination persists despite established antidiscrimination laws. A common government strategy to deter discrimination is to publicize the law and communicate potential penalties for violations. We study this strategy by coupling an audit experiment with a randomized intervention involving nearly 700 landlords in New York City and report the first causal estimates of the effect on rental discrimination against blacks and Hispanics of a targeted government messaging campaign. We uncover discrimination levels higher than prior estimates indicate, especially against Hispanics, who are approximately 6 percentage points less likely to receive callbacks and offers than whites. We find suggestive evidence that government messaging can reduce discrimination against Hispanics but not against blacks. The findings confirm discrimination's persistence and suggest that government messaging can address it in some settings, but more work is needed to understand the conditions under which such appeals are most effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do small wording differences in message-based behavioral interventions have outsized effects on behavior? An influential initial study, examining this question in the domain of political behavior using two small-scale field experiments, argues that subtle linguistic cues in voter mobilization messages describing someone as a voter (noun) instead of one who votes (verb) dramatically increases turnout rates by activating a person's social identity as a voter. Two subsequent large-scale replication field experiments challenged this claim, finding no effect even in electorally competitive settings. However, these experiments may not have reproduced the psychological context needed to motivate behavioral change because they did not occur in highly competitive and highly salient electoral contexts. Addressing this major criticism, we conduct a large-scale, preregistered replication field experiment in the 2016 presidential election. We find no evidence that noun wording increases turnout compared to verb wording in this highly salient electoral context, even in competitive states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When does increasing mobilization effort increase turnout? Recent experiments find second calls containing a reminder to vote increase turnout beyond an initial contact. We argue existing studies cannot explain why reminder calls are effective because they test bundled treatments including a late mobilization attempt, a late mobilization attempt given earlier contact, and potentially activating reciprocity established in earlier contact. We report results from a two-round voter mobilization field experiment that allows us to isolate these different mechanisms. We find that reminder calls increase turnout by 1.2% points among subjects contacted in an earlier attempt, but that enhancing reciprocity by providing a reminder call offer during an early call does not increase turnout beyond a second call. Additionally, we fail to find heterogeneous effects of reminder calls by stated preference for a reminder or by stated vote intention, suggesting certain mechanisms do not explain the effects of reminder calls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are mobilization appeals that include information about descriptive voting norms more effective at increasing turnout when the descriptive norm is framed positively (by highlighting a referent’s desirable behavior and encouraging consistent behavior) instead of negatively (by highlighting a referent’s lack of desirable behavior as problematic but also encouraging that behavior)? Few published studies have experimentally assessed this question and yield mixed results. We address the need for additional replication by designing and analyzing data from two field experiments conducted across four states in the 2014 primary and general elections. We find no differential effects on turnout of framing descriptive voting norms positively or negatively. The results are not sensitive to election context, the mode of treatment delivery, or whether the descriptive norm appeals involve a group or self-referent. Additional research is needed to understand the conditions under which positive versus negative descriptive norm framing has distinguishable effects on turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ongoing debate in political psychology is about whether small wording differences have outsized behavioral effects. A leading example is whether subtle linguistic cues embedded in voter mobilization messages dramatically increase turnout. An initial study analyzing two small‐scale field experiments argued that describing someone as a voter (noun) instead of one who votes (verb) increases turnout rates 11 to 14 points because the noun activates a person's social identity as a voter. A subsequent study analyzing a large‐scale field experiment challenged this claim and found no effect. But questions about the initial claim's domain of applicability persist. The subsequent study may not have reproduced the conditions necessary for the psychological phenomenon to occur, specifically the electoral contexts were not competitive or important enough for the social identity to matter. To address the first of these critiques, as well as other potential explanations for different results between the first two studies, we conduct a large‐scale replication field experiment. We find no evidence that this minor wording change increases turnout levels. This research provides new evidence that the strategy of invoking the self does not appear to consistently increase turnout and calls into question whether subtle linguistic cues have outsized behavioral effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the persistence of public doubts about the integrity of ballot secrecy, which depress turnout, two prior experiments have shown precise evidence that both official governmental and unofficial mobilization campaigns providing assurances about ballot secrecy increase turnout among recently registered nonvoters. To assess whether these findings replicate in other political settings, we describe a replication experiment where a non-governmental, non-partisan mobilization campaign sent similar treatment mailings containing assurances about ballot secrecy protections to recently registered nonvoters during the 2014 general election in Mississippi. We find that sending this mailer has no effect on turnout rates in this setting, which is characterized by an unusually low baseline turnout rate. These results are consistent with past research concluding that nonpartisan Get Out The Vote (GOTV) mail has very weak effects among very low turnout propensity registrants, and suggest that there are heterogeneous effects of ballot secrecy treatments associated with subjects’ characteristics and the electoral context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior experiments show that campaign communications revealing subjects’ past turnout and applying social pressure to vote (the “Self” treatment) increase turnout. However, nearly all existing studies are conducted in low-salience elections, raising concerns that published findings are not generalizable and are an artifact of sample selection and publication bias. Addressing the need for further replication in high-salience elections, we analyze a field experiment involving 1.96 million subjects where a nonpartisan campaign randomly sent Self treatment mailers, containing a subject’s vote history and a comparison of each subject’s history with their state median registrant’s turnout behavior, in high-salience elections across 17 states in 2014. Sending the Self mailer increases turnout by 0.7 points or 2.2%. This effect is largely consistent across states, with somewhat larger effects observed in states with lower ex ante election salience. Our study provides precise evidence that social pressure effects on turnout are generalizable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]