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A government's decision to communicate in a native tongue rather than a commonly used and understood but non-native language can prompt perception through an ethnically-tinted lens. While native-language communication is commonplace and typically benign, we argue that conveying a threat posed by an outgroup in a native tongue can trigger dehumanizing attitudes. We conducted a pre-registered survey experiment focusing on attitudes toward Muslim and Chinese people in India to test our expectations. In our two-stage design, we randomly assigned respondents to a survey language (Hindi or English) and, after that, to threat-provoking or control conditions. While Muslims and China are associated with recent violence against India, the government has routinely portrayed only the former as threatening. Likely due to this divergence, Hindi language assignment alone triggers Muslim dehumanization. Indians' more innocuous views of Chinese are responsive to exogenously-induced threat, particularly when conveyed in Hindi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine if increased salience of partisan competition causes affective polarization in the United States during presidential elections. To do so, we leverage the random and quasi-random timing of survey interviews conducted during election campaigns. We conduct three separate studies. In Study 1, we utilize the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), in which random survey interview timing allows for a credible causal estimate of salience on affective polarization. In Study 2, we employ American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 1980 to 2016, again leveraging survey timing to assess the effect of salience on affective polarization. In Study 3, we examine changes in affective polarization as a result of increasingly salient partisan competition using NAES and ANES panel data from 1980 to 2008. Across the three studies we identify a meaningful increase in affective polarization toward candidates, but not toward parties, as a result of heightened partisan competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigate who would vote 'none of the above' (NOTA) if this were available on the ballot paper using original data from eight European countries. In particular, we examine whether NOTA would be used by abstainers and voters to protest within the electoral process. We also test whether socioeconomic factors and specific and diffuse support for democracy and its institutions correlate with a NOTA vote. We find that having NOTA on the ballot would reduce invalid balloting more than abstention and much more than protest party voting. Our results also suggest that NOTA is related to socioeconomic status, political interest, political knowledge and distrust in political institutions and authorities, but not to broadly undemocratic attitudes. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the increasingly large amounts of abstention and invalid voting, as well as the growing distrust of political institutions, in democratic countries. They also hold lessons for electoral reformers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key challenge in survey research is social desirability bias: respondents feel pressured to report acceptable attitudes and behaviors. Building on established findings, we argue that threat‐inducing violent events are a heretofore unaccounted for driver of social desirability bias. We probe this argument by investigating whether fatal terror attacks lead respondents to overreport past electoral participation, a well‐known and measurable result of social desirability bias. Using a cross‐national analysis and natural and survey experiments, we show that fatal terror attacks generate turnout overreporting. This highlights that threat‐inducing violent events induce social desirability, that researchers need to account for the timing of survey fieldwork vis‐à‐vis such events, and that some of the previously reported post‐violent conflict increases in political participation may be more apparent than real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]