How can we measure citizens’ attitudes towards political problems in a way that generates data which are comparable across individuals, across countries, and across time? In this paper, I show how to measure these attitudes using pairwise comparisons, such that the assessments can be used as either individual-level …
Populist rhetoric – presenting arguments in people-centric, anti-elite and ‘good v. evil’ frames – is said to provide populist parties and candidates with an advantage in electoral competition. Yet, identifying the causal effect of populist rhetoric is complicated by its enmeshment with certain positions and issues. We …
Many Americans express a mix of conservative and liberal views across issues. Prior research indicates these voters are cross-pressured. A recent, influential article “Moderates” (Fowler et al. 2023) argues that these voters instead largely have centrist views on issues. To reach this conclusion, “Moderates” develops a …
In this paper we test how much party labels influence vote choices between candidates when voters have access to realistically distributed information about candidate positions and demographics. We do not seek to adjudicate a long-running debate about the role of party labels, but present some nuances on the two …
How governments raise tax revenue is at the core of domestic political conflict. Public opinion towards taxation is measured generally and qualitatively by many surveys, but previous research has not closely linked public preferences to the budget problem faced by governments regarding how best to raise or cut a …
Which types of political rhetoric are most persuasive? Politicians make arguments that share common rhetorical elements, including metaphor, ad hominem attacks, appeals to expertise, moral appeals, and many others. However, political arguments are also highly multidimensional, making it difficult to assess the relative …
Politicians are increasingly able to communicate their values, attitudes, and concerns directly to voters. Yet little is known about which of these signals resonate with voters and why. We employ a discrete choice experiment to investigate whether and which social-psychological attitudes predict how adult British …
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 …