We conduct a survey experiment testing the causal link between ethical justifications and acceptability towards two environmental policies: conservation area expansion and wildlife infrastructure. In a 2 × 3 experiment with American participants (n = 1604), we test two ethical justifications – anthropocentric justification (nature as instrumentally valuable) and a non-anthropocentric justification (nature as intrinsically valuable) compared to a control group. We find partial support that non-anthropocentric justification increases policy acceptability compared to no justification. Contrary to expectations, non-anthropocentric justification leads to higher policy acceptability than anthropocentric justification. These results are robust to individual differences in political orientation and environmental concern. Additionally, participants in the non-anthropocentric experimental condition respond that similar conservation policies generally are, and should be, passed to benefit wildlife and ecosystems compared to control group participants. Likewise, participants given the anthropocentric justification report that similar policies are, and should be, passed for humans and society compared to the control group.

Malgré l'attention accordée à l'enjeu de la mésinformation au cours des dernières années, peu d’études ont examiné l'appui des citoyens pour les mesures visant à y faire face. À l'aide de données récoltées lors des élections québécoises de 2022 et de modèles par blocs récursifs, cet article montre que l'appui aux interventions contre la mésinformation est élevé en général, mais que les individus ayant une idéologie de droite, appuyant le Parti conservateur du Québec et n'ayant pas confiance dans les médias et les scientifiques sont plus susceptibles de s'y opposer. Ceux qui ne sont pas préoccupés par l'enjeu, priorisent la protection de la liberté d'expression ou adhèrent aux fausses informations y sont aussi moins favorables. Les résultats suggèrent que dépolitiser l'enjeu de la mésinformation et travailler à renforcer la confiance envers les institutions pourraient augmenter la légitimité perçue et l'efficacité de notre réponse face à la mésinformation.

Recent studies suggest that value orientations, both pro-environmental values and concerns and left–right ideology, strongly predict climate policy support in some settings, but not in others, and that institutional quality determines the strength of these associations. These studies are based on a limited number of countries and do not investigate the mechanisms at work nor what aspects of quality of government (QoG) matter more specifically. Analyzing data from 135 European regions across 15 countries, this paper finds that QoG moderates the relationships of pro-environmental values and left–right ideology with climate tax support and suggests that political trust is an underlying individual-level mechanism. Moreover, corruption seems to be the most important aspect of QoG for policy support. In regions where corruption is prevalent and trust in state institutions is low, support for climate taxes is low even among those who are generally concerned about the environment and climate change and who favor state intervention. The study suggests additional analyses, adopting quantitative and qualitative approaches, to inform policymakers on how to increase public support for climate taxation and improve policy designs to mitigate policy concerns across various segments of the population.

Under what conditions are people more likely to support judicial invalidation of legislative acts? We theorize that constitutional recency confers greater democratic legitimacy on constitutional provisions, reducing concerns that judges may use dated language to impose their own will on a living majority. Exploiting differences among US state constitutions, we show in a pre-registered vignette experiment and conjoint analysis that Americans are more supportive of judicial review and original intent interpretation when presented with a younger constitutional provision or constitution. These results imply that Americans might alter their approach to the US Constitution if it were changed as easily and as often as a typical state constitution.

Previous research has found that individuals harboring hostile sexist attitudes are more likely to support the use of political violence. In this study, we examine this relationship further. We theorize that the impact of hostile sexism on support for political violence is mediated through two mutually reinforcing factors: social dominance orientation and political illiberalism. We test this argument using an original survey we administered to over 1,400 subjects in the United States. We employ two operationalizations of individuals’ support for political violence: support in the abstract and support for specific acts of political violence. We find that individuals who exhibit hostile sexism are substantially more likely to support political violence, both abstract and specific. Moreover, we find that both social dominance orientation and political illiberalism together mediate 64.9% of the effect of hostile sexism on support for political violence in the abstract and 80.5% of the effect on support for specific acts of political violence. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings.

A large literature considers the mid-century a key turning point in punitive public opinion in the United States. This article examines racial and geographic heterogeneity in changing public opinion during the mid-century using data on death penalty support from as early as 1953. I find that the punitive turn is characterized by divergence in death penalty support between Black and White people, and that White Southerners grew more supportive than Whites in the non-South from before to after the turn. Additional tests identify that this regional divergence is unlikely to have arisen by chance. Heterogeneity in partisanship and responsiveness to regional violent crime support is consistent with the idea that crime rates themselves were meaningful in punitive attitude formation only insofar as they were mediated by additional socio-political forces.

Legal status is an important social determinant of health. Immigration enforcement policies may be an important contributor to health disparities in the form of interior border checkpoints (IBCs). These checkpoints may prevent immigrants and their families from seeking needed medical care. Currently, we do not know how these barriers are perceived by the public. We administered a survey of 6,178 respondents from 13 November to 19 November of 2023 that contained a survey experiment to assess public attitudes on the issue. Respondents were generally not supportive of detaining individuals at IBCs or medical facilities for emergencies regardless of characteristics of the care-seeking individual. A majority was supportive of detention when medical treatment was complete. Respondents were generally more sympathetic towards children and pregnant women. Partisanship and sympathy expressed towards immigrants influenced attitudes towards detention. Findings based on race and ethnicity showed inconsistencies. A majority of Americans did not believe that IBCs should impede undocumented immigrants from accessing medical care, especially in emergency situations and for children and pregnant women. Our findings indicate that there is broad public support for expanding existing policies to allow for undocumented individuals to pass through IBCs to access medical care.

Since the 1950s, the history of European integration unfolds as a unique social experiment, witnessing the transformation of a non-existent entity into an increasingly institutionalized force. This article delves into the consequences of this ongoing institutionalization on public attitudes towards the institution itself: the European Union (EU). We argue that as European institutional integration advanced, a divide in EU support between more and less educated individuals emerged, with the latter becoming progressively less supportive. Drawing on data from eighty-five waves of the Eurobarometer survey across fifteen countries and over 820,000 individuals from 1976 to 2014, a Bayesian mixed-effects analysis reveals that the gap in support between the more and less educated significantly widened with a country's level of institutional integration. This study emphasizes the necessity of distinguishing institutional effects from temporal patterns in order to enhance our understanding of EU-related public opinion dynamics.

Polls for the past several decades indicate high regard for Jews in democracies in Western Europe and North American. We however have a limited understanding of the properties underlying those poll responses, for instance whether response bias or nonattitudes account for those results. The nonattitudes perspective suggests that respondents’ survey answers to questions about Jews are not true attitudes. Nonattitudes are weakly held responses to survey questions, and tend to be unstable over time, reflecting random as opposed to systematic change. This paper uses panel data from Voter Study Group surveys to test for individual-level stability in attitudes toward Jews by non-Jews in the United States in the 2010s to assess whether such attitudes are true or nonattitudes. Results suggest considerable instability especially when compared to attitudes toward Muslims, Democrats, and Republicans, suggesting a high degree of nonattitudes in non-Jews attitudes toward Jews. The conclusion offers reasons that might account for this instability in attitudes toward Jews and implications for the continuation of positive regard for Jews in western democracies.

In light of the growing threat of climate change and urgency of mitigation at the societal and individual level, an exponentially growing body of research has addressed how and what people think about climate change—ranging from basic judgments of truth and attitudes about risk to predictions of future outcomes. However, the field is also beset by a striking variety of items and scales used to measure climate change beliefs, with notable differences in content, untested structural assumptions, and unsatisfactory or unknown psychometric properties. In a series of four studies (total N = 2,678), scales for the assessment of climate change beliefs are developed that are comprehensive and balanced in content and psychometrically sound. The latent construct structure is tested, and evidence of high rank-order stability (1-year retest-reliability) and predictive validity (for policy preferences and actual behavior) provided.

In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade, reversing the nearly 50-year-old landmark decision that affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to abortion. Several months later, voters turned out in record numbers for the 2022 midterms, though a widely predicted “Red Wave” vote did not materialize. There has since been speculation that overturning Roe v. Wade played a crucial role in the midterms, generating a “Blue Tsunami” or “Roevember” driven largely by young, pro-choice women voting out of self-interest. We posit instead that group empathy was the key motivational mechanism in the link between opposition to Dobbs and voter mobilization in that election. Analyzing data from an original national survey, we find that opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade did not directly affect one’s likelihood to vote unless one is empathic toward groups in distress. Such opposition was actually demobilizing for those low in empathy. The findings indicate group empathy serves as a catalyst for people to act on their opposition to policies that harm disadvantaged groups, in this case women as a marginalized political minority losing their constitutional right to bodily autonomy and access to reproductive care.

The development of multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) has allowed scholars to more accurately estimate subnational public opinion using national polls. However, MRP generally recovers less accurate estimates from polls whose respondents are selected using cluster sampling – also called area-probability sampling. This is in part because cluster-sampled polls rely on a complex form of random sampling focused on national representativeness that may result in small or unrepresentative subsamples in subnational geographies. This has limited MRP’s usefulness in subnational opinion estimation in several contexts, including historical polls in the US, where cluster-sampling was common into the 1980s, and large academic studies in many countries today. In this paper, I propose two approaches to improve estimation from MRP with cluster-sampled polls. The first is pooling data from multiple surveys to produce a larger sample of clusters. The second is clustered MRP (CMRP), which extends MRP by modeling opinion using the geographic information included in a survey’s cluster-sampling procedure. Using simulations, I show that both methods improve upon traditional MRP, and I validate them using historical polls in the US