This article describes how and why propaganda affected recipients differently in two distinct situations, namely forced exposure and selective exposure, when they received propaganda during a series of six original survey experiments conducted in China. The prevailing view is that people are more likely to resist information they receive if their exposure to it is forced. But the study addressed in this article found that citizens who prefer not to view propaganda news, when given a choice, actually demonstrate higher average treatment effects on pro-regime attitudes compared to those who willingly read propaganda news (i.e. where participants in the control group were assigned a reading of non-propaganda news). Moreover, this study shows that participants who prefer not to read propaganda news exhibit higher average treatment effects when rating the issue presented in the news as more understandable and important—compared to those who willingly engage with the propaganda. That suggests a possible rationalization pathway in this phenomenon.1

Emotions and their sociopolitical impact have received increasing scholarly attention. However, it remains largely unclear whether emotional expression within surveys is subject to social desirability bias. By drawing on impression management theory and the disclosure decision model, I argue that emotional expression is likely prone to social desirability bias in interviewer-administered survey modes and test my hypotheses on mixed-mode ANES data. The findings demonstrate that respondents significantly underreport negative emotions—anger and fear—when interviewed face-to-face as compared to online. Furthermore, positive emotions, such as hope and pride, are not exempt from biased reporting related to interview mode. These results highlight the risks of estimating emotions and their salience by either relying on interviewer administration or combining survey modes.

Industrial concentration has increased in recent years with large companies consolidating their dominant positions. Concentrated markets are thought to benefit large firms as they earn elevated profits and gain political influence. Antitrust law is the main policy tool to reduce concentration. Calls to strengthen antitrust have come from the political left and the right, yet we know little about public support for such policies. We test how economic, moral, and democratic concerns influence support for antitrust. We find that the public does not respond to the consumer price benefits of antitrust but is moved by arguments invoking concerns for fairness and the importance of maintaining democratic institutions. We find that Republicans and Democrats often respond in divergent ways, with Republicans being less supportive of antitrust when informed that it could punish successful companies, whereas Democrats are more concerned about using antitrust to curb corporate influence. The findings accord with a general concern on the left for limiting business influence in politics and a concern on the right for maintaining business growth.

Can the “us versus them” dynamic in politics undermine support for democracy even in the absence of strong party identification? While much is known about affective polarization in the USA, its impact on democratic commitment in other contexts remains understudied. We examine Chile’s 2022 plebiscite, where voters decided whether to approve or reject a new constitution amid low levels of party trust and identification. Through an experiment using an unobtrusive primer, we successfully induced short-term affective polarization, heightening animosity across multiple dimensions. Our findings show that individuals primed to this polarization significantly reduced their support for democracy, mirroring patterns observed in the USA. These results emphasize the importance of studying affective polarization, especially in regions with fragile democratic histories.

Extensive research showcases that authoritarian propaganda can cultivate support and deter protest during “normal” times. This study examines authoritarian propaganda’s efficacy during crises and policy changes when the regime needs it most. We posit that various propaganda strategies, including “hard” and “soft” rhetoric, have significant limitations during crises. Hard propaganda’s heavy-handed slogans could signal regime strength but may also legitimize “rightful resistance” against local authorities, limiting its protest-deterrence effects. Soft propaganda may lose persuasiveness due to presenting contradictory arguments during policy changes. We leverage the turbulent period of China’s COVID policy reversal to conduct an original survey experiment in December 2022. Our findings reveal that pro-reopening hard propaganda weakens its protest-deterrence effects by reinforcing belief in protest righteousness. Moreover, inconsistent soft propaganda lowers public evaluations of China’s COVID response, diminishing its persuasive effects. Our study highlights significant limitations of authoritarian propaganda during crises and policy changes.

In recent decades, activists and leaders of government and nongovernment organizations have increasingly and explicitly called for greater attention to human dignity in their efforts to promote pro-social relations. In this study, we investigate whether appeals to this core human value actually influence how individuals act with regard to those who might be otherwise ignored or neglected. Using the digital advertising platform on Facebook, we randomly assign ads to over 90,000 adult American users to estimate the effects of dignity appeals on their likelihood of engaging with content concerning people facing homelessness or incarceration. Consistent with preregistered hypotheses and specifications, we find that adding dignity appeals increases the likelihood of positive reactions to such ads, but only when the vulnerable are considered less “blameworthy” for their situation.

The boom in survey experiments in international relations has allowed researchers to make causal inferences on longstanding foreign policy debates such as democratic peace, and audience costs. However, most of these experiments rely on mass samples, whereas foreign policy is arguably more technocratically driven. We probe the validity of generalizing from mass to elite preferences by exploring preferences of ordinary U.S. citizens and foreign policy experts (employees of the U.S. Department of State) in two identical conjoint experiments on democratic peace. We find that experts are not only more opposed to military actions against other democracies than members of the public—but also that overall preferences about the matters of war and peace are stronger among foreign policy professionals.

The increasing multimodality (e.g., images, videos, links) of social media data presents opportunities and challenges. But text-as-data methods continue to dominate as modes of classification, as multimodal social media data are costly to collect and label. Researchers who face a budget constraint may need to make informed decisions regarding whether to collect and label only the textual content of social media data or their full multimodal content. In this article, we develop five measures and an experimental framework to assist with these decisions. We propose five performance metrics to measure the costs and benefits of multimodal labeling: average time per post, average time per valid response, valid response rate, intercoder agreement, and classifier’s predictive power. To estimate these measures, we introduce an experimental framework to evaluate coders’ performance under text-only and multimodal labeling conditions. We illustrate the method with a tweet labeling experiment.

This study examines whether women politicians address violence against women (VAW) more effectively than their male counterparts at the local level in Mexico. Using a regression discontinuity design that leverages close mayoral elections, we find that women mayors reduce some of the most egregious violent crimes committed against women, with estimates suggesting a 64.7% reduction in homicides of women over their 3-year terms. As evidence of potential mechanisms, we find that women mayors actively work to combat VAW, appoint more women to leadership and support roles, and expand specialized services for crime victims. These findings suggest that women’s representation in local politics may be an important factor in advancing women’s safety.

How did the COVID-19 outbreak affect citizens’ democratic preferences? Were the changes persistent or temporary? We track a representative sample of Spanish citizens before, during, and after the pandemic, with eight survey waves from January 2020 to January 2024. We compare democratic attitudes before and after the pandemic with individual fixed effects models. We identify a sharp increase in preferences for technical rather than ideological policy-making at the very onset of the pandemic, as well as significant changes in voters’ preferences for competent rather than honest politicians. These changes are sudden and persistent over 4 years. Using a set of repeated survey experiments, we also document a widespread willingness to sacrifice rights and freedoms to deal with the pandemic as compared to other global threats, such as international terrorism and climate change. But this effect quickly faded over time. Overall, we identify significant changes in democratic attitudes during the pandemic and a durable shift in technocratic preferences that outlived the pandemic, setting the conditions for the long-term legacies of COVID-19 on democracy.