Search

How is the desire of citizens to run for local public office influenced by the existence of disclosure laws and how do citizens trade them off with other institutional arrangements like wages or discretion in office? This paper explores how different types of potential citizen candidates (pro-social vs. rent motivated) value and trade off these different dimensions and how it influences the quality of the candidate pool (measured by education). We first elicit preferences for national disclosure regulation and lobby rules using two conjoints experiments. Second, using a factorial experiment, we randomly vary hypothetical local office rules and study their effects on the desire of respondents to run for local office.

Which rules drive popular support for political disclosure? Lobbying disclosure rules are discussed in many countries as means to increase transparency and curb conflicts of interests of politicians, but calls to strengthen these rules often face staunch opposition from policy-makers. In the context of campaign finance, experimental and quasi-experimental studies show that transparency affects candidate choice (Wood 2022), and that transparency audits which show non- compliance with campaign finance rules profoundly impact legislators’ behaviour and re-election chances (Wood and Grose 2021). Moreover, bureaucratic transparency can lead to improved project performance, under certain institutional conditions (Honig, Lall, and Parks 2022). However, we know little about whether voters actually support increases to political disclosure and transparency, and if so, which design features of disclosure system drive public support. In addition to the lobby register, we will also investigate preferences for politician behavior which could contribute to transparency of potential conflicts of interest, such as cooling off periods between holding a public office and starting to work as a lobbyist/in the private sector, or side jobs of politicians. The conjoint will force the respondent to choose between and rate two politicians proposing different rules for for 1) a lobbying register and 2) rules of conduct for politicians. In particular, we focus on the institutions covered by the proposed rules, the strength of possible sanctions in the case of non-compliance, and the detailedness of disclosed information. We evaluate how these different policy dimensions affect vote choice, politician support, and political trust. Prior to the conjoint, we will prime relative comparisons to other countries by displaying information on the stringency of lobbying register rules in Germany/the UK, in comparison to other countries and organisations (Ireland, United States, European Commission). We expect respondents to support more extensive rules of they perceive their country to have less extensive rules, compared to other countries. In addition, we want to investigate how respondents trade off dimensions of political transparency. While citizens are likely to support more stringent transparency measures as a means to strengthen accountability and good governance, they might perceive certain rules as too bureaucratically burdensome or as inhibiting political compromise, as stricter transparency could make informal consensus-seeking between politicians and stakeholders more difficult (Fehrler and Hughes 2018; Harden and Kirkland 2021). The results of our study have important implications for the design of accountability and transparency mechanisms and the electoral costs to policy-makers who wish to introduce or reform these rules.

Do the public strategies of interest groups affect voters’ policy positions? Special interest groups can use two broad influence strategies: (1) inside lobbying strategies aimed at directly seeking access to politicians and providing information, and (2) outside lobbying strategies via public communication, information campaigns, demonstrations, rallies, and public statements. In this study focuses on the public communication strategies of interest groups and coalitions vis-a-vis voters, and whether these strategies serve to move voter’s preferences. We present subjects with two environmental policy proposals and then confront individuals with the outside strategies of environmental interest groups and coalitions supporting these policies. We concentrate on environmental policies due to the clear distributional consequences and the current state of discussion of the climate transition in Germany and across Europe. We thus hold constant the type of group, the type of support, and vary instead the strategy, messenger type, and policies. Thus, we vary 4 Dimensions in the experiment

* 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.

In this project, we study the allocation of the COVID-19 vaccine during the current pandemic. The roll-out of the vaccination program provides a unique opportunity to study the determinants of citizens’ attitudes towards the public allocation of scarce goods. We seek to answer the following research questions: (1) How can governments increase the willingness to get vaccinated and (2) what governments can do to increase the support for the allocation of vaccinations.

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 describe the analysis plan for two studies in a multi-wave set of surveys. We study two questions: Under what conditions do citizens support reductions in rights in order to reduce Covid spread? Under what conditions do citizens support sharing of vaccines and financial aid to buy vaccines?

Governments often change their policy recommendations on issues that are uncertain. How do voters react to recommendations in these situations? In particular, how effective are these messages in changing citizens beliefs and what is the moderating effect of trust in the sender. Could governments have the incentive not to report new evidence anticipating a backlash from citizens for inconsistent messages? We investigate these questions using an incentivised online experiment with 9000 German respondents.

Objectives: - A. Identifying participation Types: Why are people answering online surveys: Ideally we seek to classify participants into a "Leisure" set and a "Labor" set. - B. Characterization of Types: How are labor and leisure types different: e.g. on wealth, age, political attitudes? - C. Incentives and Participation by Type: What are the differential effects of incentive on taking part in the survey across types? - D. Incentive and Response Quality by Type: What are the differential effects of incentive across types?

It is well known that socio-economic status (SES) affects the health status of individuals. The so called “social gradient” in health is manifested in better health conditions and lower mortality risks of higher SES groups. In light of the pandemic, the question of social inequality in the timely access to vaccination is a strongly related issue. Does socio-economic status has an impact on the chance of having got/getting vaccinated? Has this relationship changed over time? And what is the role of social networks with regard to explaining the nexus between socio-economic status and individual vaccination status?

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.

In this project, we study international solidarity and international benchmarking during the cur- rent COVID-19 pandemic. The roll-out of the vaccination program provides a unique opportunity to study both, the citizens’ attitudes towards international solidarity as well as the effect of bench- marking on voter attitudes and behaviour. We seek to answer the following research questions : Work Package 1: International Solidarity 1. What are the predictors of citizens’ willigness to share COVID-19? 2. can information campaigns increase international solidarity among citizens? Work Package 2: Benchmarking 1. How do international comparisons with regard to the performance of governments affect voter attitudes and behaviour? We ran a pre-test between 27-28 of April collecting 305 observations (see earlier version of the pre-analysis plan and questionnaire). After that, we changed the following: • We included a manipulation check for experiment 1 (pre- and post-treatment question) • In addition to our behavioural outcome, we included an additional attitudinal outcome for experiment 1 • We included age as a covariate to measure heterogenous treatment effects for experiment 2

Increasing political polarization is a challenge for developed and developing democracies worldwide (Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro 2020). Going back to De Tocqueville (1835), a long line of research suggests that the well-being of democracies depends on intersectional social relations. The idea builds on two streams of literature. First, a literature on intergroup contact suggests that contact with outgroup members, such as direct interpersonal conversations, can reduce prejudice (Allport, Clark, and Pettigrew 1954). Overall, the literature provides mixed evidence.1 For example, recent field experiments showed that inter-group contact can be effective in increasing cohesion between different religious (Scacco and Warren 2018) economic (Rao 2019), or cast (Lowe 2021) groups. However, the research also found that inter group contact might not always lead to a change in political views (Heuser and Stötzer 2022), might not translate into contexts outside of the intervention (Mousa 2020), and might not reduce prejudice (Scacco and Warren 2018). Moreover, positive effects might fade out after a short while (Santoro and Broockman 2021). Related evidence suggests that conversations between politically like-minded individuals may lead to more extreme political views (Heuser and Stötzer 2022). A second line of research suggests that effects of political conversations depend on characteristics fo processes and can be by-products of nonpolitical social processes (Minozzi et al. 2020). Building on these ideas, recent interventions showed that political communication between participants who share non-political characteristics but differ on political attitudes seems to be an effective strategy to promote consensus on divisive political topics (Balietti et al. 2021). Yet, previous work did not study whether these effects hold across different types of topical areas. In addition, previous research designs that randomly assign participants of an experiment to a treatment of interpersonal interaction (Balietti et al. 2021) can sometimes make it difficult to recover effects is settings where we expect self-selection (Acemoglu 2010). For this, we need to understand who would engage in interpersonal interaction both as a sender and receiver, i.e. who would select into treatment (Humphreys and Scacco 2020). Lastly, experiments rarely examine the short and long-run effects of these interventions. This study addresses these issues by replicating and extending the design of Balietti et al. (2021) in two ways. First by studying treatment effects in a controlled environment (respondents get randomized into contact with in-group/out-group) and a self selection environment (with self selection into contact with in-group/out-group). Second by varying the type of topic under discussion from a traditional issue (preferences on redistribution) to a more novel issue (preferences on the mandatory vaccination). The table below illustrates.

Supplemental material, HKP_Supplemental_Appendix_ for The Influence of Cause and Sectional Group Lobbying on Government Responsiveness by Vincent Hopkins, Heike Klüver and Mark Pickup in Political Research Quarterly

online_appendix_final for Minority governments and legislative reliability: Evidence from Denmark and Sweden by Heike Klüver, and Radoslaw Zubek in Party Politics