It is difficult to measure public views on tradeoffs between spending priorities because public understanding of existing government spending is limited and the budgetary problem is complicated. We present a new measurement strategy using UK taxpayer summaries as the baseline for a continuous treatment, multivariate …
How well do citizens understand the associations between social groups and political divisions in their societies? Previous research has indicated systematic biases in how the demographic composition of party supporters are perceived, but this need not imply that citizens misperceive the likely voting behaviour of …
Note: This working paper has been incorporated into our book Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion and Political Choice. We provide the clearest evidence to date for an ‘issue publics’ account that reconciles conceptions of democracy premised on policy voting with longstanding evidence that citizens typically lack ‘real’, stable …
Measuring how much citizens care about different policy issues is critical for political scientists, yet existing measurement approaches have significant limitations. We provide a new survey-experimental, choice-based approach for measuring the importance voters attach to different positional issues, including issues …
From September 2025 through August 2030, I am the primary investigator for a European Research Council Advanced Grant project Citizen Attitudes Towards National and International Problems (CATNIP). The initial stage of the project will seek to improve how political science measures which problems citizens think are …