Do group identities rooted in salient social and political characteristics foster homophily and social distance? If so, which identities shape social preferences more strongly, and under what conditions? While existing literature on affective polarization and inter-group relations privileges particular social and political identities, we know less about the dynamics that unfold when multiple identities are considered simultaneously. Using conjoint experiments in five multiparty systems (Argentina, Chile, Italy, Portugal, and Spain), we find that political identities are generally more influential than social ones among individuals with partisan affinities. This is especially true among left-wing individuals, who display greater social distance to radical right supporters. Our findings suggest that social distance is rooted in political attachments, which may channel salient social divisions.

For several decades, democracies across the Globe have faced the persistent threat from terrorist attacks. A possible consequence of terrorist threat is that citizens come to find men candidates relatively more appealing compared to women candidates. However, recent meta-analyses reveal that citizens generally prefer women over men candidates when terrorist threat is absent. Here, we report the results from a pre-registered conjoint experiment testing whether the terrorist risk assessment from the official Danish intelligence authority (Politiets Efterretningstjeneste, PET) affects candidate gender preferences among a sample of 1,034 representative Danes. Results reveal an average marginal component effect of 8.6 percentage points favoring women candidates in the absence of terrorist threat. However, when the risk of terrorism against Denmark is made salient, this effect is significantly reduced to 5.3 percentage points. Follow-up analyses reveal that left-wing respondents change their candidate gender preferences most when terrorist threat becomes salient. Implications for challenges to political representation are discussed.

Accurate perceptions of parties’ political positions are necessary for accountability and representation. Politicians signal their political positions to voters through policy messages; however, policy messages alone often do not work as intended. Furthermore, since politicians use various ideological labels, voters may have a complicated understanding of political positions across multiple dimensions. Thus, discrepancies can arise between ‘objective’ and ‘perceived’ positions. We hypothesized that voters use the tone of politicians’ questions (polite or impolite) and cooperation with other parties to infer a party’s political position. To test this hypothesis, this study conducted a conjoint experiment in Japan while also disentangling voters’ conceptions of left–right, liberal–conservative, and progressive–conservative scales. We found that voters form perceptions of politicians’ political positions based on their confrontational and cooperative behaviour.

Do geopolitical considerations affect European citizens’ attitudes toward incoming Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)? This article draws on existing literature to derive hypotheses about the geopolitical drivers of citizens’ opposition to FDI. We test these hypotheses with a conjoint experiment embedded in a survey fielded in the EU’s three largest economies: France, Germany, and Italy (N ≈ 4,500). Our micro-foundational evidence shows that three factors consistently shape opposition to inward FDI across all three countries: (1) concerns about relative gains—citizens are more likely to oppose investments that benefit the sending country more than their own; (2) military alliance status—citizens are less likely to oppose FDI from security allies; and (3) EU membership—citizens are significantly less opposed to investments from other EU Member States. Contrary to prior expectations, we find no evidence of a consistent “China effect.” Overall, the findings suggest that the EU’s recent shift toward a more geopolitical approach to investment screening broadly aligns with the preferences of its public.

Increasing polarization across many contexts raises the question of whether justice measures exacerbate or mitigate social divisions. To develop hypotheses about how justice operates in divided contexts, this article draws on theoretical perspectives from the interdisciplinary field of transitional justice. It examines convergence and divergence in fairness evaluations using a fully randomized conjoint experiment. The experiment was embedded in nationally stratified online surveys in Japan (n = 2,700) and South Korea (n = 3,000). The bilateral setting provided a useful research site for a study of a divided context: contested colonial legacies and a variety of justice measures for addressing the past, which were suitable for experimental manipulation. The results show that most justice measures elicit opposing responses in the two countries while simultaneously reducing differences between them. This reveals a paradox of justice: even divisive justice measures can, under certain conditions, bring groups closer together. This framework enables to classify the effects of justice measures into convergent, divergent, and paradoxical configurations and to consider the theoretical and empirical implications for existing and future experimental research on social conflict and divided societies across disciplines.

Scholarly interest in the evaluation of atheist candidates for office has been growing. In the aggregate, atheists are a political pariah. However, aggregate effects conceal a wide partisan gulf, with Democrats more open and Republicans more averse to atheist candidates for office. Less is known about biases that nonreligious candidates with less stridently secular views might encounter in political evaluation. Focusing on broadly conceptualized nonreligion, I make several contributions to the literature: 1) I partially replicate the findings on the links between nonreligion and political appraisal using a conjoint experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey; 2) I assess the relative importance of nonreligion and other factors that influence candidate appraisal; 3) I investigate how partisanship and religiosity interact to affect receptivity to candidate nonreligion; and 4) I examine how age and religiosity interact to influence Democrats’ and Republicans’ openness to candidate nonreligion.

How do voters react to the individual characteristics of crises following events such as pandemics or floods? In the aftermath of crises following such events, governments may find they are sanctioned by voters, because the crises can provide voters with important information concerning the qualities of incumbents in handling crisis or their responsibility for the ensuing hardships. However, existing research provides limited evidence concerning the characteristics of crises that voters rely on to evaluate the government’s responsibility for or performance in handling them. The present article addresses this gap by providing evidence obtained from a conjoint experiment conducted among British voters. The results show that when voters sanction governments following a crisis, they focus overwhelmingly on the government’s perceived crisis management performance. Voter perceptions of crisis management performance are driven by the severity of the crisis, prevention and relief spending, as well as the behaviour of the political elites. In contrast, voter perceptions of government responsibility for the crisis are affected less strongly by crisis characteristics, such as crisis severity, prevention spending and expert statements.

Global North countries have pledged to support Global South countries in adapting to climate change. This support can take many forms, including providing aid (in situ) or accepting immigrants (ex situ). Focusing on the Netherlands, a generous climate aid provider with a high share of immigrant population, we explore how domestic support for an overseas adaptation policy package is influenced by levels of migration and aid directed at Global South countries that vary in their location, as well as economic links with and policy proximity to the Netherlands. Using an online forced-choice conjoint experiment, we asked Dutch respondents (n = 1199) to compare two policy packages. We find that respondents support policy packages with: (1) lower numbers of immigrants, (2) lower volumes of aid, and (3) migrants from countries in geographical proximity (Albania) and shared religion (Colombia), but not Pakistan and Somalia. Moreover, they support countries that (4) import from the Netherlands and (5) have pledged to become climate-neutral earlier, a policy priority for the Netherlands.

Do politicians consider the gender of party leaders when selecting coalition partners? Little is known about whether gender shapes how political elites evaluate potential coalition allies. I theorize that politicians prefer women as coalition partners for their perceived qualities, such as consensus building, trustworthiness, and governance abilities, making them a less threatening option for politicians’ aspirations. Conducting an original conjoint experiment with 979 Spanish mayors, I find that mayors, especially those on the center and left, prefer to form coalition governments with parties led by women. The analysis of the mechanisms suggests that women leaders are perceived as easier to communicate and more competent to govern. These findings suggest that gendered perceptions and stereotypes may play a role in elite decision-making and shaping coalition preferences.

Issue ownership is an important determinant of the vote, and it is electorally beneficial for parties to build a strong reputation on their core issues. Even though issue ownership has already been studied extensively in the party literature, we know less about how citizens form ownership perceptions. We contribute to this literature by means of two studies on the connection between party behaviour and perceptions of issue ownership, with an empirical focus on issue competence reputations of parties. In Study 1, we combine party‐level information about issue attention, positions and performance with data on competence perceptions from a wide range of national election studies. Study 2 is a pre‐registered conjoint experiment designed to examine the causal link between party behaviour and perceived competence. Our results point to significant effects for all three hypothesised sources of competence reputations. Moving beyond previous work that has argued that competence reputations are mostly stable over time, after accounting for the variation due to parties' popularity, our results show that they fluctuate in the short term and that parties have some level of control over how they are perceived.

Recent studies suggest that citizens are unlikely to trade off free elections for other desirable outcomes, such as economic growth. However, while free elections are central to democracies, today democracy is not often undermined by abolishing elections. Our study shifts the focus to citizens' willingness to trade off the more granular democratic principles frequently eroded in backsliding processes – such as judicial independence, media freedom or horizontal accountability – for higher incomes. Through a seven‐country conjoint experiment, we analyse how citizens prioritize among these principles and estimate their ‘willingness to pay’ – or the additional income needed to persuade citizens to give these principles up. We find that while citizens do not relinquish free elections easily, they are more open to forgo liberal principles undermined in backsliding processes, especially when these principles are eroded gradually, one at a time. These findings help explain why democratic backsliding may be often tolerated by citizens.

Does gender affect candidate selection and list placement under proportional representation (PR)? Existing research argues that PR systems have a positive effect on women's representation due to a more inclusive candidate selection process. However, analysing the actual process of candidate selection under PR before observing the final party list is challenging, and little is known about the preferences and strategies of party elites when selecting and ranking candidates. To address this lacuna, we conduct a novel two‐stage conjoint experiment with party elites in Austria, which allows us to differentiate between two distinct mechanisms in candidate nomination under PR: selection and ranking. Our findings indicate that women generally have an advantage with respect to selection but find themselves subject to same‐sex preferences when it comes to ranking on the list, for which they otherwise benefit from being low in supply. These findings have important implications for understanding patterns of female under‐representation in PR systems.

This paper applies a conjoint experiment to assess the sources of contemporary social status hierarchies in Western Europe. Social status has become a popular concept in political science to explain resentment against economic and cultural transformations. However, we do not know whether cultural sources like race and gender have an independent causal effect on social status perceptions. Furthermore, these characteristics may be more contested between societal subgroups and thus have a weaker stratifying effect than income or occupation. This study employs an innovative conjoint experiment, conducted in Switzerland, to systematically assess the multidimensional sources of status. The design asks respondents to place profiles with randomized criteria and thus captures intersubjective status perceptions. In contrast to evaluating one's own placement on the social status hierarchy, placing others provides more accurate insights about the structural force of social status. The results show that both economic and cultural sources strongly shape social status, with occupation, race/ethnicity and income being most important. Furthermore, different subgroups agree on the hierarchy no matter their own status. This study helps to understand the structural roots of political resentment by showing that both cultural and economic inequalities are recognized.

This study presents the results from a series of conjoint experiments evaluating how the various components of political systems affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). Compared to earlier studies, our approach is unique in that we were able to disentangle the effects of otherwise highly collinear variables corresponding to three defining features of any political system, namely (1) access to power, (2) the policy‐making process and (3) performance. We fielded identical conjoint experiments in countries with significant variations across the key independent variables: France, Hungary and Italy. Overall, our study supports the view that citizens are more satisfied with democracy in consensus systems than in majoritarian democracies, while it also contributes to identifying the respective weight of the specific components of political systems. Respondents across all countries recognize that proportionality and party system fragmentation magnify their voices by creating a more representative political climate. With regard to output legitimacy, we find that respondents identify good economic performance and public probity as important features of a well‐performing democracy. The positive effect of the legislators’ constituency orientation on SWD is a particularly noteworthy result that is currently understudied in the literature. Moreover, the state of the economy has by far the biggest impact on SWD, which indicates a highly materialistic view of democracy in all three countries.

Despite decades of research on the nature and characteristics of populism, and on how political actors interpret populist attitudes, the study of how the public identify populist politicians remains a largely unexplored topic. Is populism in the eye of the beholder? What causes voters to perceive a political actor as populist? Is there any systematic heterogeneity in the evaluation of candidates among citizens according to their individual characteristics? We fill this gap by analysing what characteristics of politicians, and the political statements they make, drive citizens to classify them as populist. Furthermore, we investigate how the cognitive, ideological and attitudinal profiles of citizens shape their perceptions. To this end, we report results of a conjoint experiment embedded in a survey administered to a nationally representative sample of Italian citizens. Respondents were asked to evaluate different political statements by politicians, of whom we manipulated a variety of relevant attributes (e.g., their ideological profile, gender, previous occupation). Results indicate two clear trends: (i) More than the profile of politicians, what matters for their identification as populist is their rhetoric. (ii) The cognitive (with the partial exception of education) and ideological profiles of respondents are largely inconsequential. At the same time, populist voters are substantively less likely to identify populism as such.

Coalition building depends on citizens having a ‘compromising mindset’: they must accept that parties need to compromise in order to gain influence and that this entails deviating from the original policy positions. In this study, we show that European citizens understand that compromise is essential for democratic governance and that they, holding everything else constant, prefer political parties that express a willingness to compromise. This finding appears to be independent from specific forms of coalition politics and to be widespread across different levels of political interest, formal education and even ideological extremity. Our analysis compares observational data from the Austrian National Election Survey (AUTNES) 2020 and an original survey from Denmark in 2021. We also present results from a conjoint experiment fielded in Denmark, which evaluates the effect of willingness to compromise on vote choice. Our finding is good news for European democracies where coalition politics and thus compromise is a necessity for governance. Yet, for vote‐seeking politics, the situation is complex as citizens might sometimes punish parties for compromising, but sometimes also punish them for not compromising.

What democratic institutions and practices do citizens prioritize, and how responsive are their preferences to competing concerns such as economic and physical security? We explore this through a conjoint experiment with over 35,000 respondents across thirty-two countries – spanning democracies and autocracies – who evaluate hypothetical countries varying in democratic features, cultural characteristics, economic prosperity, and physical security. Our findings reveal that citizens consistently prioritize free and fair elections, highlighting their salience as a core democratic value. However, executive constraints appear less central to citizens’ preferences, especially when set against the promise of economic prosperity. These patterns hold across a wide range of national and individual contexts. The results suggest that while elections remain symbolically and substantively important, many citizens are responsive to appeals that frame strong, unconstrained leadership as a pathway to economic prosperity – an emphasis often seen in electoral authoritarian regimes.