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Public opinion research often identifies evangelical Christians based on a double-barreled, yes-or-no, question asking respondents whether they are an evangelical or born-again Christian. This paper uses a survey experiment to demonstrate the implications of this measurement strategy. Among White Americans, more than one-third of those whom researchers classify as evangelical using the standard double-barreled question actually eschew the evangelical label; the same is true for just under two-thirds of African Americans. Additionally, these born-again non -evangelical Christians hold less conservative political outlooks compared to the self-identified evangelicals with whom they are grouped, and, in fact, oftentimes more closely resemble those who reject both the evangelical and born-again labels. Despite this, the double-barreled identification question produces a White "evangelical or born-again" group that looks politically similar to a composite "evangelical" or "born-again" group based on two questions asking about each identity separately. Finally, important differences appear across race, suggesting that religious and political histories affect how people interpret and respond to double-barreled questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opposition to LGBT rights remains a contemporary fixture within the United States in spite of increasingly liberalizing attitudes toward LGBT individuals. In this paper, I argue that a potentially overlooked factor driving this opposition is rural identity—or an individual's psychological attachment to a rural area. Using data from the 2020 ANES, I find that rural identity predicts less favorable estimations of LGBT individuals. Rural identifiers are also less likely to support pro-LGBT policy measures than nonrural identifiers. Nevertheless, I find the magnitude of the effects of rural identity on anti-LGBT views to be surprisingly small. It is also the case that, on average, rural identifiers exhibit net-positive estimations of LGBT individuals and are broadly supportive of LGBT rights, suggesting that elected officials enacting anti-LGBT legislation in rural areas of the United States are potentially out of step with the preferences of their electorate. These findings also have implications for what it means to hold a rural identity beyond a generalized animosity toward urban areas, and for understanding urban-rural divergences in US public opinion on issues such as LGBT rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust in one's fellow citizens and in politicians are both conducive to well-functioning government. Beyond their separate importance, it is a long-standing notion that generalized social trust and political trust are connected in a mutually reinforcing relationship that further undergirds democratic governance. While it is well established that social trust and political trust are robustly positively associated at the individual level, there is much less compelling evidence regarding the causal nature of this relationship. Previous analyses have been unable to adequately rule out confounding and correct for reverse causality. This paper tackles these challenges through data and a research design close to ideally suited for addressing the causal status of the relationship. Using a 20-wave individual-level panel survey from Sweden analyzed using a dynamic panel model, we find evidence for a relatively strong positive causal effect of political trust on social trust, but little evidence for the reverse relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the migration of public opinion surveys to online platforms has often lowered costs and enhanced timeliness, it has also created new vulnerabilities. Respondents completing the same survey multiple times from different IP addresses, overseas workers posing as Americans, and algorithms designed to complete surveys are among the threats that have emerged in this new era. This paper is an attempt to measure the prevalence of such respondents and their impact on survey data quality, while demonstrating methodological approaches for doing so. Prior studies typically examine just one platform and rely on closed-ended questions and/or paradata (e.g. IP addresses) to identify untrustworthy interviews. This is problematic because such data are relatively easy for bad actors to fake. We carried out a large-scale study with an eye toward overcoming these limitations. This study examines the threat of insincere respondents using large samples from six online platforms: three opt-in survey panels, two address-recruited survey panels, and a crowdsourced sample. Rather than relying solely on closed-ended responses, we incorporated an analysis of 375,834 open-ended answers. By their very nature, open-ended questions offer a more sensitive indicator of whether a respondent is genuine or not. The study found that the incidence of insincere respondents varied significantly by the type of online sample. Critically, insincere respondents did not just answer at random, but rather they tended to select positive answer choices, introducing a small, systematic bias into estimates like presidential approval. Two common data-quality checks failed to detect most insincere respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into cyber-conflict, public opinion, and international security is burgeoning, yet the field suffers from an absence of conceptual agreement about key terms. For instance, every time a cyberattack takes place, a public debate erupts as to whether it constitutes cyberterrorism. This debate bears significant consequences, seeing as the ascription of a "terrorism" label enables the application of heavy-handed counterterrorism powers and heightens the level of perceived threat among the public. In light of widespread conceptual disagreement in cyberspace, we assert that public opinion plays a heightened role in understanding the nature of cyber threats. We construct a typological framework to illuminate the attributes that drive the public classification of an attack as cyberterrorism, which we test through a ratings-based conjoint experiment in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel (N = 21,238 observations). We find that the public (1) refrains from labeling attacks by unknown actors or hacker collectives as cyberterrorism; and (2) classifies attacks that disseminate sensitive data as terrorism to a greater extent even than physically explosive attacks. Importantly, the uniform public perspectives across the three countries challenge a foundational tenet of public opinion and international relations scholarship that divided views among elites on foreign policy matters will be reflected by a divided public. This study concludes by providing a definitive conceptual baseline to support future research on the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satisfaction with democracy (SWD) is one of the most commonly studied topics in the fields of political behavior and public opinion. Gauged with a survey question that asks respondents whether they are satisfied with the way democracy works, SWD has featured as an independent or dependent variable in more than 400 publications. In this Synthesis, we review the evolution and findings of this nearly 50-year-old body of literature, identifying gaps and disagreements. We pay particular attention to issues of measurement and conceptualization, research methodology, and real-world importance. We conclude by highlighting critical areas of future research, including continued investigation into the measurement of SWD and what the question captures, more qualitative and (quasi-)experimental work, more focus on emotions and extreme (dis)satisfaction, and greater geographic coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relative importance of ideological orientations and material self-interest as determinants of political attitudes is still discussed. Using a novel list experiment on opposition to progressive taxation embedded in a large representative Danish online survey (N  = 2,010), I study how social desirability concerns bias the conclusions survey researchers draw regarding the influence of self-interest (gauged by income) and ideology (measured by left-right self-identifications) on public opinion. I find that right-wingers are much less opposed to progressive taxation when attitudes are measured indirectly and unobtrusively by means of the list experiment relative to asking directly about their opinions. In fact, rightists are no more against progressive taxation than leftists and centrists. Furthermore, opposition to tax progressivity is considerably lower among low-income individuals when social desirability bias is addressed, thereby increasing the attitudinal gap between low- and high-income individuals. The implications of the findings are that survey research risks exaggerating the importance of ideological orientations and underestimating how much political views reflect material self-interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do international shaming efforts affect citizens' support for government policies? While it is a frequent claim in the literature that shaming works through domestic politics, we know little about how and when international criticism affects domestic public opinion. We address this question through an originally designed survey experiment in Sweden, which (i) compares the effects of international shaming in two issue areas—human rights and climate change, and (ii) tests whether government responses to criticism moderate the impact of shaming. Our main findings are fourfold. First, we find substantial effects of international shaming on domestic public opinion. These effects hold across both issue areas and irrespective of whether citizens support government parties or not. Second, human rights shaming has a stronger impact on citizens' support for government policies than climate shaming. Third, shaming is most effective among citizens who are more supportive of climate action, human rights, and international cooperation. Finally, our findings are mixed with respect to the effect of government responses. While government responses do not moderate the effects of human rights shaming, they seem to mitigate the effects of climate shaming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Divergent public responses to police brutality incidents demonstrate that for some, police violence is an injustice that demands remediation, while for others state violence is justice served. We develop a novel survey experiment in which we randomize the race and gender of a victim of police violence, and then provide respondents with an opportunity to establish justice via compensation. We uncover small but consistent effects that financial restitution is most supported for a White female detainee and least supported for a Black female detainee, and this is largely driven by White respondents. Beyond the treatment effects, we show that Black respondents are much more likely to perceive detainees as deserving of restitution; across all treatments, Black respondents are 58 percent more likely than Whites to support a financial settlement. We further show that White respondents' perceptions of deservingness are highly related to their perceptions of who is at fault for the beating—the detainee or the police—and whether the detainee was involved in crime. Black respondents remain likely to award a settlement even if they think the detainee was at fault and involved in crime. Our results provide further evidence that perceptions of who deserves restorative justice for state violence are entangled with race in targeted ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though a record number of women ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020, Clinton's loss in 2016 led pundits, party elites, and voters to worry about whether the country would be willing to support a woman for president, and polling organizations regularly asked questions that tapped into such concerns. While the vast majority expressed willingness to vote for a woman for president in polls, people were more skeptical about how their neighbors felt. Our research question cuts to the heart of this issue: How does polling information about comfort with the idea of a woman president affect perceptions of the electability of actual women running for their party's nomination, and in turn voting decisions? We expect that exposure to signals of low comfort with a woman president will reduce perceptions of electability, and in turn dampen support for women at the nomination stage, but there are competing hypotheses for how signals of high comfort will be received. We further expect that Democratic women will be most affected by such information. We test these expectations with an experiment fielded on the 2019 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Our findings have important implications for media coverage of polls related to women running for executive office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the role of "political discontent" as a second dimension of American public opinion. Others have shown that a second dimension tends to capture social and/or racial attitudes. What happens when indicators of discontent are included in such analyses? Using data from two surveys and the ordered optimal classification (OOC) procedure, we scale seven items from the "discontent" literature alongside a larger set of questions that has been shown to capture the two-dimensional structure of mass opinion. Discontent items dominate the second dimension in both data sets. Further, five of the seven items predict voting for "insurgents" in the 2016 presidential primaries. Second-dimension attitudes matter in elections and concern the political system writ large. By extension, the liberal-conservative heuristic gives an incomplete picture of mass political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On average, over 1 in 10 women in the United States have difficulty getting pregnant and carrying a pregnancy to full term, with women of color experiencing infertility at nearly twice the rate of non-Hispanic white women. Although infertility rates are significantly higher within Black and Latino communities, treatment and success rates are significantly lower. We seek to understand whether views of in vitro fertilization (IVF, a common reproductive technology), particularly within communities of color, are shaped by a broader skepticism about new medical technology. Using data from a 2013 national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, we measure medical mistrust across racial/ethnic groups and test whether these beliefs are associated with views toward IVF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer novel tests of hypotheses regarding the conditional relationship of psychological needs to political ideology. Using five personality measures and a large national sample, our findings affirm that political engagement plays an important moderating role in the relationship between needs for certainty and security and political identification, values, and policy preferences. We find that needs for certainty and security are strongly associated with right-wing political identification and cultural values and policy preferences, particularly among politically engaged citizens. In the economic domain, however, we find that needs for certainty and security are typically associated with left -wing values and policy preferences among politically unengaged citizens. It is only among politically engaged citizens that such needs are associated with right-wing economic values and policy preferences. Our findings confirm the importance of heterogeneity across both ideological domain and political engagement for how psychological needs translate into political ideology in the American mass public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If citizens pay insufficient attention to tax policies or cannot figure out how they are taxed, politicians may raise taxes more than is desired by the public, with few electoral repercussions. This scenario is central to the notion of "fiscal illusion" and is potentially problematic from a democratic point of view. In this article, I argue that payday is an opportunity for citizens to update their tax preferences. When people are paid and taxed, they are likely to think more about personal consumption relative to public consumption and be more aware of how the current tax system affects their personal finances, leading to increased tax skepticism. Studying this in Denmark, where payday falls on the same day for most people, and using a temporal regression discontinuity design, I find that support for tax cuts goes up by approximately 10 percentage points at payday. Further analyses suggest that this result is not driven by narrow economic self-interest, because the effect does not systematically vary across income groups. Rather, payday seems to mobilize ideological predispositions, as the effect is largest among rightists, for whom taxes are an especially strong political symbol. The implications for opinion formation and democratic accountability are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted social media platforms to take unprecedented steps—ranging from false tags to journalistic factchecks—to stanch the flow of misinformation that could pose a health risk. However, there is little evidence about the relative efficacy of these approaches in this unique context of a pandemic. Using a pair of survey experiments, we examine whether false tags and journalistic factchecks reduce accuracy misperceptions and sharing propensity on social media that can spread false claims. False tags had little effect on subjects' accuracy assessments and social media sharing. Journalistic factchecks that offer accurate information to counter misinformation were more effective in reducing both misperceptions and sharing on social media. Further, we find no evidence of partisan backfire effects, even in response to interventions against claims with a plausible partisan valence. Our results suggest that journalistic factchecks provide an effective counternarrative to COVID-19 misinformation even in the context of the increasing politicization of America's pandemic response and polarization more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Americans are anxious about crime regardless of their actual exposure or risk. Given this pervasive concern, US presidents frequently talk about crime, take actions to address it, and list crime prevention efforts among their top accomplishments. We argue that presidents act this way, in part, because fear of crime translates into lowered presidential approval. However, this penalty is not applied evenly. Given the parties' stances toward crime and the criminal justice system, White Americans punish Democratic presidents (i.e. Clinton and Obama) more severely when they are anxious about crime, while Black Americans are more punitive toward Republican presidents (i.e. Bush and Trump). We examine twenty years of survey data and find evidence consistent with our theory. Our results suggest that the relationship between fear of crime and presidential accountability is conditioned by an individual's race and the president's party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents trends in public opinion toward immigration in the European Union (EU), between 2002 and 2018. Immigration is a salient and contentious issue in contemporary politics across Europe and is used by Eurosceptic parties in both government and opposition to mobilize support. Public opinion data—drawn from the European Social Survey and the Eurobarometer—reveals the following noteworthy trends over the past two decades. First, positive public attitudes toward immigration have increased across member states, with a temporary setback in 2015–16. Second, immigration is a divisive issue throughout the EU. While public opinion in some regions generally favors immigration, opinion is divided everywhere. Third, despite regional variations between northern, western, and southern Europe, EU-wide trends suggest the emergence of a collective public opinion, crossing national borders. Fourth, despite vocal political opposition to immigration, solid majorities of the public view immigration favorably over time and across regions. To the numerous studies of European public opinion on immigration, this article contributes a useful overview of the long-term trends, with regional and EU-wide presentation and data visualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here we document an under-studied but important phenomenon that we call ascendant public opinion , which emerges when a new concern is framed as an instance of a broader issue and gains ascendancy over that issue in the public's mind. We focus on the ever-increasing role climate change has come to play over the past three decades in shaping how Americans think about broader environmental concerns. We show that news coverage of the environment has focused increasingly on climate change over time, while climate change concurrently has come to dominate all other environmental problems in the strength of its association with general environmental concern in opinion surveys. Panel studies provide evidence that the growing correlation between attitudes on climate change and the environment is predominantly due to the impact of the former on the latter. These developments have been consequential: we estimate that Americans' level of concern about the environment is now both more elevated and more polarized along party lines than if climate change did not occupy its dominant place on the environmental agenda. Climate change is likely just one example of how ascendant public opinion can have important consequences for politics and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore attitudes toward internal and foreign migration in China using an original survey experiment. If labor-market competition drives attitudes, then residents will be opposed to migrants with comparable skill levels, regardless of migrant origin. If residents fear a dilution of national identity, then they will be more opposed to foreign than internal migration. We conduct a national survey in Mainland China, where we randomly assign respondents to answer questions about migrants with different skill levels and from either foreign countries or other provinces in China. We find that attitudes cleave over skill level, but the foreign-internal dimension is, on its own, not a salient cleavage in preferences. However, when considering high-skilled migrants, respondents are more supportive of foreign than internal migration; when considering low-skilled migrants, they are more opposed to foreign than internal migration. The results cast doubt on material explanations for attitudes toward migration and suggest a reevaluation of cultural threat arguments that privilege national borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late James A. Davis characterized American public opinion in the Reagan era as "conservative weather" amidst a liberalizing "climate." By climate, he meant differences between cohorts, while the weather referred to trends within cohorts. Thirty years later, the public opinion climate continues to get more liberal, as each successive cohort continues to be more liberal, on balance, than the ones that came before them. Recent weather complements that by being quite liberal, too. Specifically, 62 percent of variables analyzed were more liberal in recent birth cohorts than they were in the oldest ones, but just 5 percent were more conservative (some did not differ among cohorts, and some were neither liberal nor conservative). Within cohorts, recent measurements were more liberal than early measurements for 51 percent of the variables and more conservative for 11 percent [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If voters are to hold governments to account for the state of the economy, they must know how it has changed. Indeed, this is a prerequisite for democratic accountability. Yet the perceptions that voters report often show signs of clear partisan bias. At present, we do not know if this bias is real or instead due to priming in political surveys. To test this, I assign subjects at random to either a political or nonpolitical survey. I then record their economic perceptions and compare the results for each group. I show that political surveys do worsen partisan bias, though only among supporters of the incumbent party. Still, much partisan bias remains unexplained, even in the nonpolitical condition. So, while economic perception items remain biased, we can at least be sure that most people respond to them in a similar way no matter the survey context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Did the election of Donald Trump have an immediate effect on trust in the US government in Latin America? While on the campaign trail, the Republican candidate used strong and derogatory language to describe Latin American countries and people and made policy proposals that could deteriorate US-Latin American relations. However, the effect of the Trump election on attitudes toward the United States might be null or minimal if Latin American citizens have strong priors and/or if they do not pay attention to political information. Therefore, it is not clear whether the 2016 election led to a rapid decline in trust in the US government in Latin America. Leveraging the timing of the field implementation of the 2016 wave of the AmericasBarometer in five Latin American countries, we estimate the effect of the 2016 presidential election on respondents' attitudes using a regression discontinuity design in time. We find that the election of Trump substantively decreased respondents' trust in the US government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, researchers have examined people's beliefs across countries and over time using national samples of citizens. Yet, in an era when economies, societies, and policymaking have become increasingly interconnected, nation-states may no longer be the only or most relevant units of analysis for studying public opinion. To examine what people think about politics on a global scale, we develop tools for measuring public opinion that allow us to transcend national and regional boundaries. Starting with the world as the unit of analysis and humans as the relevant population, we measure and then explore patterns and trends in human preferences for democratic government and political leaders with the help of surveys collected around the world since 1994. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital trace data have the potential to offer rich insight into complex behaviors that were once out of reach, but their use has raised vital and unresolved questions about what is—or is not—public opinion. Building on the work of James Bryce, Lindsay Rogers, Herbert Blumer, Paul Lazarsfeld, and more, this essay revisits the discipline's historical roots and draws parallels between past theory and present practice. Today, scholars treat public opinion as the summation of individual attitudes, weighted equally and expressed anonymously at static points in time through polls, yet prior to the advent of survey research, it was conceived as something intrinsically social and dynamic. In an era dominated by online discussion boards and social media platforms, the insights of this earlier "classical tradition" offer two pathways forward. First, for those who criticize computational social science as poorly theorized, it provides a strong justification for the work that data scientists do in text mining and sentiment analysis. And second, it offers clues for how emerging technologies might be leveraged effectively for the study of public opinion in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is much concern today about the spread of fake news and the misinformation it can produce among the public. In this article, we investigate how the American public interprets accurate and inaccurate statements from the news. Moving beyond partisanship, we theorize that ideological and ethnoracial identities also shape individuals' interpretations of the news. We argue that people have incentives to interpret information they encounter in ways that favor their ideological and ethnoracial ingroups and that these incentives are particularly strong when ideological and ethnoracial identities align. Using a survey that asks respondents to classify statements from news stories as facts or opinions, we find support for these hypotheses. Liberals and conservatives, and white, Black, and Hispanic respondents, more often classify as factual statements that favor their ingroup's interests while classifying information opposing their ingroup's interests as opinions. Holding cross-cutting ethnoracial and ideological identities diminishes these effects, while identities that align produce stronger ingroup biases in information processing, particularly among whites. Our study reveals that it is not only partisanship but also ideological and ethnoracial identities that shape how Americans interpret the news, and therefore how informed, or misinformed, they are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]