Stephen Jessee

Racial differences in partisan vote have been studied extensively, with recent work documenting shifts in longstanding differences. Recently, attention has shifted to education as a dividing line in American politics. I analyze data from extremely large surveys in each of the last five presidential election years, focusing on the average ideological positions of racial and educational subgroups. I show that ideological differences have decreased sharply by race, driven primarily by Blacks becoming more conservative, but also Hispanics moving to the right. Over the same time period, differences in average ideology by education have grown dramatically, with less educated Americans being much more conservative and more educated Americans being much more liberal. These trends by education have occurred across different racial groups, but have been most dramatic among whites.

Conducting novel surveys that allow the first direct comparisons between Supreme Court decisions and public preferences, Jessee et al. find that the Court moved sharply to the right between 2020 and 2021 and attribute this change to the replacement of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Justice Amy Coney Barrett. We extend Jessee et al.'s analysis by presenting additional data gathered between 2022 and 2025. We find that the Supreme Court maintained its conservative position in 2022 but then moderated in 2023 following the backlash to the decision in Dobbs v. Mississippi (2022), which repealed Roe v. Wade (1973). We show that despite the composition of the Court remaining stable and the identity of the median voter being unchanged between 2021 and 2025, there is an ebb and flow to the representativeness of Court decisions, with the institution sometimes further to the right of the public and then sometimes shifting closer to the average voter. However, despite these important periodic shifts, the Court has, since 2021, generally remained in a more conservative position relative to the ideological positioning of the American electorate. Our findings have important implications for the legitimacy of the Court and the stability of the rule of law.

As political issues have increased in complexity, public opinion researchers increasingly ask respondents about sophisticated political topics that may require substantive knowledge and analytic skills, raising concerns about survey satisficing. In this note, we examine the correlates of one manifestation of this kind of satisficing—response order effects, or when respondents are more likely to pick the top response options from a list. We do this by analyzing randomized response order experiments embedded in surveys conducted across three years, where 6,291 respondents provided their opinion on 40 complex issues before the Supreme Court. We find an overall response order effect of 2.8 percentage points with substantial heterogeneity related to both question length and respondent knowledge. These factors also interact with one another; among the most sensitive subpopulation—low-knowledge respondents answering long questions—the predicted response order effect was 17.4 percentage points. On the other hand, question complexity and respondent education did not moderate response order effects. Our practical advice for researchers asking about complex issues is that they should focus on being brief, rather than using extra words to make the language simpler.

Survey experiments on probability samples are a popular method for investigating population-level causal questions due to their strong internal validity. However, lower survey response rates and an increased reliance on online convenience samples raise questions about the generalizability of survey experiments. We examine this concern using data from a collection of 50 survey experiments which represent a wide range of social science studies. Recruitment for these studies employed a unique double sampling strategy that first obtains a sample of “eager” respondents and then employs much more aggressive recruitment methods with the goal of adding “reluctant” respondents to the sample in a second sampling wave. This approach substantially increases the number of reluctant respondents who participate and also allows for straightforward categorization of eager and reluctant survey respondents within each sample. We find no evidence that treatment effects for eager and reluctant respondents differ substantially. Within demographic categories often used for weighting surveys, there is also little evidence of response heterogeneity between eager and reluctant respondents. Our results suggest that social science findings based on survey experiments, even in the modern era of very low response rates, provide reasonable estimates of population average treatment effects among a deeper pool of survey respondents in a wide range of settings.

Previous research focused on popular US Supreme Court rulings expanding rights; however, less is known about rulings running against prevailing public opinion and restricting rights. We examine the impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion, which overturned Roe v. Wade’s (1973) constitutional protection of abortion rights. A three-wave survey panel (5,489 interviews) conducted before the leak of the drafted Dobbs opinion, after the leak, and after the official opinion release, and cross-sectional data from these three time points (10,107 interviews) show that the ruling directly influenced views about the constitutional legality of abortion and fetal viability. However, personal opinions were not directly influenced and perceived social norms shifted away from the ruling, meaning that individuals perceived greater public support for abortion. We argue that extensive coverage of opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade supported this shift. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization also caused large changes, polarized by party identification, in opinions about the Supreme Court.

Researchers face difficult decisions about whether to ask potential moderators before or after a survey experiment. Competing concerns exist about priming respondents before the experiment and about introducing post-treatment bias. We replicate the classic “welfare” versus “assistance to the poor” survey experiment, randomly assigning respondents to be asked a battery of racial resentment questions either before or after the question wording experiment. We find little evidence that the question wording effect is different between those who are asked about racial resentment before versus after the experiment. Furthermore, we find little evidence that measured racial resentment is affected by this ordering or by the question wording treatment itself.

Significance: Leveraging three unique surveys collected over a decade that ask members of the public about the policy issues before the US Supreme Court, we show how the court stands relative to the public. As we demonstrate, the court has, since 2020, become much more conservative than the public and is now more similar to Republicans in its ideological position on key issues. We also find that members of the public update their beliefs about the court’s ideology when its composition and rulings change. Even so, many members of the public currently underestimate the court’s conservative leaning, which in turn makes them less likely to support making changes to the institution than they would otherwise.

Using multiple large national surveys, we investigate how the relationship between policy-based ideology and vote choice in presidential elections differs across demographic groups. Specifically, we consider three key demographic characteristics: race, education, and gender. We find that large differences exist in the way ideology relates to presidential vote for voters from different racial groups. By contrast, we find quite small differences in this relationship when separating voters by education level. Perhaps most surprisingly, whereas men are on average more conservative than women, the relationship between ideology and presidential vote is estimated to be almost exactly the same for the two genders. The large sample sizes we employ allow for relatively precise estimation of these relationships even among our various demographic subsamples and these findings hold similarly across several recent presidential elections.

Questions about people’s perceptions of politicians or other political actors are of central interest in a wide variety of research areas. But measuring these perceptions is difficult in part because respondents may use survey response scales in different ways. In a classic article, Aldrich and McKelvey (1977) introduce a method adjusting for such differential item functioning by assuming that all respondents perceive political stimuli identically. I propose a modeling approach built on the Aldrich and McKelvey framework but incorporating anchoring vignettes. This approach allows for scale use adjustments without assuming that all respondents perceive a given politician identically. I apply this model to data on Americans’ perceptions of parties, elected officials, and other political actors, showing that, contrary to previous arguments, most variation in ideology ratings is due not to differing scale use, but to differences in underlying perceptions. Specifically, while perceptions of Republican politicians and the Republican party show no significant differences by respondent partisanship, Democratic and Republican respondents differ strongly in their perceptions of the ideology of Democratic political actors as well as the Supreme Court.