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Voters’ beliefs about the strength of political parties are a central part of many foundational political science theories. In this article, we present a dynamic Bayesian learning model that allows us to study how voters form these beliefs by learning from pre-election polls over the course of an election campaign. In the model, belief adaptation to new polls can vary due to the perceived precision of the poll or the reliance on prior beliefs. We evaluate the implications of our model using two experiments. We find that respondents update their beliefs assuming that the polls are relatively imprecise but still weigh them more strongly than their priors. Studying implications for motivational learning by partisans, we find that varying adaptation works through varying reliance on priors and not necessarily by discrediting a poll’s precision. The findings inform our understanding of the consequences of learning from polls during political campaigns and motivational learning in general.

In the absence of an effective treatment or vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, preventing further transmission of the virus is a major challenge. In addition to mobility restrictions and testing efforts, governmental and corporate actors have started to deploy digital contact tracing apps in support of classical contact tracing. However, a key condition for these apps to work is the comprehensive uptake and usage by substantive parts of the population, in particular by those at risk of exposure and transmission. By design, privacy restrictions of many apps impede both evaluation of these tools and decision-making to support uptake. Combining a unique set of mobile tracking data to measure uptake of Germany’s official tracing app with an online-representative panel survey, we explore the predictability of app uptake with respondent characteristics. Using a randomized intervention, we then identify the effects of short video messages addressing privacy concerns and pro-social versus self-serving behavior on behavioral compliance and other relevant outcomes.

We implement a persuasion experiment using arguments about five policies. The experiment is combined with a paired conjoint experiment, to elicit citizen preferences for candidates with policy positions on the five policies. The experiment is framed in the context of policy consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to identify (a) the downstream effects of arguments on candidate choice, (b) a persuasion effect of policy arguments, and (c) a priming effect of policy arguments.

In elections, people often have to decide between voting for their preferred candidate or supporting a less appealing but more viable alternative. However, we know surprisingly little about what enables citizens to navigate these strategic trade-offs. Combining experimental and observational evidence from the UK, we differentiate three crucial preconditions for strategic voting---motivation, information, and capabilities---and provide converging evidence illuminating how these factors interact. Specifically, we hypothesize that high levels of motivation---while having only little direct impact on strategic voting---are a necessary condition for the beneficial effects of information and capabilities to manifest.

We will conduct a citizen forecasting project for the German Federal Election of 2021. We will field a survey that asks respondents about the expected vote share for the parties on the federal level and for the district candidate results. Afterward, we will conduct a between-subject design in which we show respondents either information from the most recent poll about party support, information about the last district results, or both and ask them again about their expected district candidate results. We aim to identify whether the extra information provided to respondents increases predictive accuracy and certainty in citizen forecasts of district-level results. We further study whether the extra information provided better aligns respondents' forecasts with proportional or unit swing forecasting models.

* we conducted a soft-lunch and made several changes to the design and questionaire (see prevision version of the pap) Research in the Social Sciences has studied political protest and its effects in various ways and contexts. A key assumption—specifically in research studying the effects on policy outcomes and political decision making—is that protest can affect public opinion. The idea is that social move- ments frequently take actions before the public at large fixes its opinion on an issue; meaning that protest provides crucial information for the public to adapt its preferences. A posited mecha- nism is that through their protests affect bystanders – people who do not attend such protests but observe them – by manipulating the impression of how many citizens support policy change (Wa- sow, 2020, APSR; Enos, Kaufman, Sands, 2019, APSR; Gamson, 1975, Strategy of Protest; Gillion, 2013, The Political Power of Protest). If and to what extent protest can in fact achieve this depends on the characteristics of protest— such as their size, violence, used force by the police to name just a few (see e.g.: Lohmann, 1993, APSR). Yet, since research on political protest has largely been observational (but see: Hager et al., 2021, APSR) it is difficult to draw causal inferences regarding the effects of protests on social preferences. It is also difficult to assess which segements of society are more or likely to self select into exposure to protest and how this selection moderates overall effects. In this study we set out to analyze if and how political protest can affect bystanders’ preferences and their perception of norms by relying on a survey experimental design embedded in a long- running and large-scale panel of German citizens.

Rising inequalities have been described as a fertile ground for populist parties allover the globe. In this article, we argue that the perception of inequality alone canstrengthen populist attitudes and increase support for populist parties. Using datafrom the International Social Survey Programme, we find that those who perceivegreater inequality in society are more likely to support populist parties. To explorethe causal relationship, the study also conducts a survey experiment in Denmark,Germany, and Italy, randomly exposing participants to factual information aboutthe wealth distribution. The results show that the perception of inequality canincrease populist attitudes, but does not immediate affect the likelihood of votingfor populist parties in this context. The findings speak to current debates on howinequality and their perception became a pre-condition for the rise of populistparties all over Europe.

We implement a persuasion experiment using arguments about five policies. The experiment is combined with a paired conjoint experiment, to elicit citizen preferences for candidates with policy positions on the five policies. The experiment is framed in the context of the political campaign for the election to the German Bundestag in 2021. We aim to identify (a) the downstream effects of arguments on candidate choice, (b) a persuasion effect of policy arguments, and (c) a priming effect of policy arguments.

We conduct a survey experiment to study the effects of campaign focus on the support for the CDU/CSU in the German Federal Elections of 2021. The experiment randomizes respondents into two treatment groups and a control group. Respondents in the two treatment groups receive CDU campaign material that focuses on environmental topics and economic topics respectively. The campaign material contains a poster, a press release, an interview with the CDU chancellor candidate, and a social media post. The control group does not receive any material.

We extend a previous study of uptake of Germany’s official COVID-19 contact tracing app (see https://osf.io/6jstp/). Using a randomized intervention, we identify the effects of varying monetary incentives on people’s willingness to install and use the app on their mobile device and other relevant outcomes.

We field a survey for studying the role of risk preferences in coalition-directed voting decisions. The survey contains a three-group between-subject experiment that allows us to test the hypothesis that voters are on average risk averse when it comes to coalition-directed voting. Moreover, the experiment allows us to investigate whether individual general preferences towards risks matter for coalition-directed voting.

We implement a paired conjoint with forced choice experiment to elicit citizen preferences in the moral dilemma of triage decisions. The experiment is framed in the context of the looming consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on resource allocation in hospitals. We aim to identify (a) key heuristics applied in the population to make these ethically difficult choices, (b) how they vary across subpopulations, and (c) how they vary across countries.

We field a survey for studying the role of risk preferences in coalition-directed voting decisions. The survey contains two within-subject experiments that allow us to test the hypothesis that voters are on average risk averse when it comes to coalition-directed voting. Moreover, the experiment allows us to investigate whether individual general preferences towards risks matter for coalition-directed voting.

This letter investigates how voter transitions between parties affect parties’ policy positioning. While a growing literature investigates the role of election results as signals for parties’ policy adaption, it has mostly focused on vote changes of individual parties. However, parties do not know only whether they have won or lost in an election; they also have detailed information on which parties they won votes from and which parties they lost votes to. We make two arguments about how voter transitions should affect the strategic policy choices of political parties. First, when a party has lost votes to another party it will adapt its policy positions toward that party. Second, parties that have overall lost more votes become more likely to adapt their positions. Making use of a data set on individual voter transitions and party positions we can demonstrate that voter transitions indeed affect parties’ competitive behavior.

Public opinion polarisation can impair society’s ability to reach a democratic consensus in different political issue areas. This appears particularly true when the polarisation of opinions coincides with clearly identifiable social groups. The literature on public opinion polarisation has mostly focussed on the US two-party context. We lack concepts and measures that can be adapted to European countries with multi-party systems and multi-layered group identities. This article proposes a conceptualisation of polarisation between groups in society. It presents a measure that captures the overlap of ideology distributions between groups. The two-step empirical framework includes hierarchical IRT models and a measure for dissimilarity of distributions. The second part presents an empirical application of the measure based on survey data from Switzerland (1994–2016), which reveals insightful dynamics of public opinion polarisation between party supporters and education groups.

A multitude of political science research assumes that the same ideological dimension guides the interaction between citizens and elites. Public opinion research has repeatedly underlined that this assumption is unlikely to apply to the entire public. In this article, I test the expectation that the interplay between exposure to public debate information and partisan identities makes citizens align their preferences with the elite ideological dimension. I develop a joint scaling model for citizens’ and legislators' preferences that allows for heteroscedastic deviations of citizens’ policy preferences from the elite model. Applications to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study of 2008–2012 and the Senator Representation Study show that elite ideology can be a more reliable constraint on political preferences for exposed partisans, compared to unexposed non-partisans. The findings have implications for studies of party strategies, representation and political behavior that build on the assumption of shared ideological dimensions.

The application of spatial voting theories to popular elections presupposes an electorate that chooses political representatives on the basis of their well-structured policy preferences. Behavioral researchers have long contended that parts of the electorate instead hold unstructured and inconsistent policy beliefs. This article proposes an extension to spatial voting theories to analyze the effect of varying consistency in policy preferences on electoral behavior. The model results in the expectation that voters with less consistent policy preferences will put less weight on policy distance when learning about candidates who should represent their political positions. The study tests this expectation for the 2008 US presidential election, and finds that for respondents with less consistent self-placements on the liberal–conservative scale, policy distance less strongly affects their voting decision. The results have implications for the quality of political representation, as certain parts of the electorate are expected to be less closely represented.