Abstract
Surveys based on self-reported hygiene-relevant routine behaviors have played a crucial role in policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, using anchoring to test validity ...in a randomized controlled survey experiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, we demonstrate that asking people to self-report on the frequency of routine behaviors are prone to significant measurement error and systematic bias. Specifically, we find that participants across age, gender, and political allegiance report higher (lower) frequencies of COVID-19-relevant behaviors when provided with a higher (lower) anchor. The results confirm that such self-reports should not be regarded as behavioral data and should primarily be used to inform policy decisions if better alternatives are not available. To this end, we discuss the use of anchoring as a validity test relative to self-reported behaviors as well as viable alternatives to self-reports when seeking to behaviorally inform policy decisions.
There has been an impressive stride in the research on policy feedback effects on mass publics over recent years. However, we lack systematic evidence on how large such policy feedback effects are in ...the literature. This article provides a review of 65 published studies and quantifies the findings and key themes in the policy feedback literature. The results show a great degree of heterogeneity in the domains and outcomes being studied and in the effects of policies on the public. In line with the findings from narrative reviews, feedback effects are greater for outcomes related to political participation and engagement. Last, the review sheds light on important theoretical and methodological limitations to be addressed in future research.
近年来，在政策反馈的大众效应上进行的研究取得了令人瞩目的进展。但是，文献中缺乏系统性的证据来说明这种政策反馈效应会有多大。本文对65篇已发表的研究进行了综述，并量化了政策反馈文献中的研究结果和关键主题。我的量化结果表明，各研究领域和结果，以及政策对公众的影响都展示出了很大程度的异质性。依照叙事性综述的发现，反馈效应在与政治参与相关的结果上更为突出。最后，本综述揭示了重要理论和方法上的局限性，这些局限性需要在未来的研究中得到解决。
In order to explain differences in political interest, two strands of literature point to the relevance of either dispositional or situational factors. I remedy this and show how political interest ...is shaped by the interplay between personality differences and the political environment. Specifically, I demonstrate that people with a stable motivation for engaging with new ideas are more interested in politics when exposed to new political events, e.g. during election campaigns and when unexpected events unfold. The results have implications for our understanding of political inequalities in democratic engagement and shed light on how citizens' interest in politics can be relatively stable over time as well as responsive to the political environment in predictable ways.
Despite the increasing interest in populism, there is a lack of comparative and longterm evidence on the electoral performance of populist parties. We address this gap by using a novel dataset ...covering 92 populist parties in the European Parliament elections from 1979 to 2019. Specifically, we provide aggregate data on the electoral performance of all populist parties as well as the three ideational varieties of populism, i.e. right-wing, left-wing and valence populist parties. We show that there is significant variation both across countries as well as between the ideational varieties of populism. Most notably, while the success of left-wing and valence populists is concentrated in specific areas, right-wing populist parties have consolidated as key players in the vast majority of EU countries.
Do personal experiences matter for public attitudes towards the role of the government? In the domain of healthcare, I argue that policies change the salience of personal experiences for government ...attitudes. Specifically, I expect that personal experiences matter less for government attitudes when healthcare is publicly financed, that is, when there is less emphasis on financing healthcare via market-based choices. Empirically, I link subjective and objective personal experiences from the International Social Survey Programme to macro-level policy indicators. The analysis provides strong support for the expectation and contributes to a growing body of literature interested in the underpinnings of government attitudes in a comparative perspective.
Alle analyser af medieindhold skal forholde sig til et spørgsmål med væsentlige implikationer for analysens resultater: Hvilken periode skal analyseres? Flere videnskabelige undersøgelser har i den ...forbindelse anvendt uge 46 som en dataindsamlingsstrategi. I denne artikel placerer vi dette valg i en metodisk kontekst og ekspliciterer potentielle faldgruber forbundet med denne indsamlingsstrategi. Vi analyserer, om eksisterende studier, der anvender uge 46, undgår disse faldgruber, og introducerer praktiske retningslinjer for, hvordan forskere bedst besvarer spørgsmålet om, hvilken periode der skal analyseres, når man ønsker at undersøge indhold i medierne.
While the diversity of populism has received considerable attention, surprisingly little is known about populist parties that defy clear-cut left-right categorization. We show that valence populist ...parties are non-positional and substantially different from both left-wing and right-wing populist parties. First, we demonstrate that valence populist parties deliberately take blurry positions on both the economic and socio-cultural dimensions of competition. Second, we show that such an ambiguity is counterbalanced by a disproportionate emphasis on anti-corruption appeals, the most paradigmatic example of a non-positional dimension. Our results have important implications for our understanding of varieties of populism, in particular, and the positional and non-positional competition strategies of political parties, in general.
Abstract
A large body of literature has provided mixed results on the impact of welfare retrenchments on government support. This article examines whether the impact of welfare retrenchments can be ...explained by proximity, i.e. whether or not the retrenched policy is related to people's everyday lives. To overcome limitations in previous studies, the empirical approach utilizes a natural experiment with data from the European Social Survey collected concurrently with a salient retrenchment reform of the education grant system in Denmark. The results confirm that people proximate to a welfare policy react substantially stronger to retrenchment reforms than the general public. Robustness and placebo tests further show that the results are not caused by non-personal proximities or satisfaction levels not related to the reform and the government. In sum, the findings speak to a growing body of literature interested in the impact of government policies on mass public.
Publicly-available data from the World Values Survey (WVS) is an extremely valuable resource for social scientists, serving as the basis for thousands of research publications. The most recent ...assessment (Wave 6) was the first to assess Big Five personality traits, and this data has already been used in published research. In the present paper, we show for the first time that the Big Five data from WVS Wave 6 is extremely problematic: items from the same trait correlate negatively with each other as often as not, occasionally to truly extreme degrees. Particular caution is warranted for any future research aiming to use this data, as we do not identify any straightforward solution to the data's challenges.
•The World Values Survey recently collected Big Five data for the first time.•This data has already been uncritically incorporated in refereed publications.•This data appears reliable in the two WEIRD countries.•This data appears quite unreliable everywhere else.
The second decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a significant ‘rightward drift’ as populists in the West scored striking electoral gains. We argue that this reflects a shift in the power of ...electoral cleavages that is asymmetric in nature. Specifically, voters for whom immigration is salient are more likely to switch to conservative and national populist parties than to liberal or left-wing parties. We leverage data from three prominent cases, the United States, Britain and Germany, to demonstrate that immigration-specific asymmetric realignment occurred in the three countries. These findings have implications for our understanding of electoral politics, populism and the emerging ‘culture divide’ in party systems.
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