Thomas J. Leeper

How do votes in direct democratic ballots translate into policy preferences about future outcomes and affect the perceived legitimacy of those outcomes? This article examines these questions in the context of sovereignty referendums: specifically, the 2016 referendum on British membership of the European Union (EU). While the referendum result gave the British government a mandate for Britain leaving the EU, it did not provide any firm guidance as to the kind of Brexit that voters would prefer and consider legitimate. To examine the perceived desirability and legitimacy of different Brexit outcomes, we conducted a nationally representative conjoint experiment measuring attitudes towards different possible negotiation outcomes. Our findings show that ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ voters were highly divided over what they wanted from Brexit on salient negotiation issues, but also that most voters did not regard any possible outcome as legitimate.

A well-functioning democracy requires a degree of mutual respect and a willingness to talk across political divides. Yet numerous studies have shown that many electorates are polarized along partisan lines, with animosity towards the partisan out-group. This article further develops the idea of affective polarization, not by partisanship, but instead by identification with opinion-based groups. Examining social identities formed during Britain's 2016 referendum on European Union membership, the study uses surveys and experiments to measure the intensity of partisan and Brexit-related affective polarization. The results show that Brexit identities are prevalent, felt to be personally important and cut across traditional party lines. These identities generate affective polarization as intense as that of partisanship in terms of stereotyping, prejudice and various evaluative biases, convincingly demonstrating that affective polarization can emerge from identities beyond partisanship.

Immigration is highly salient for voters in Europe and the USA and has generated considerable academic debate about the causes of preferences over immigration. This debate centers around the relative influences of sociotropic or personal economic considerations, as well as noneconomic threats. We provide a test of the competing egocentric, sociotropic, and noneconomic paradigms using a novel constrained preference experiment in which respondents are asked to trade off preferred reductions in immigration levels with realistic estimates of the personal or societal costs associated with those reductions. This survey experiment, performed on a national sample of British YouGov panelists, allows us to measure the price-elasticity of the publicʼs preferences with regard to levels of European and non-European immigration. Respondents were willing to admit more immigrants when restriction carries economic costs, with egocentric considerations as important as sociotropic ones. People who voted for the UK to Leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum are less price-elastic than those voting Remain, indicating that noneconomic concerns are also important.¹

Mass media are frequently cited as having the potential to inform the public, raising knowledge levels and reducing political knowledge gaps between citizens. But media are also seen as a force for segmentation, disengagement, and widening differences between citizens. If media have no effect on political knowledge, gaps between the engaged and disengaged persist regardless of who is exposed to news because no one learns. But gaps can also persist even if everyone learns from the news, particularly if learning effects are heterogeneous across those inclined and disinclined to seek out news and/or across environments that consist of different media alternatives. Yet past research on political communication has not sufficiently linked media choice to debates about possibly heterogeneous effects of media exposure on political knowledge levels. The present study contributes a novel and large-scale choice-based experiment on knowledge of the ongoing crisis in Syria that finds media effects are relatively homogeneous across those with different media preferences and across different media environments. This suggests that under most conditions – even when everyone learns from the news – knowledge gaps between the politically engaged and disengaged are widened or at least sustained after incidental exposure to politics. While closing such gaps may be impossible, the results have important implications for understanding how citizens learn about politics and how to study learning from self-selected media experiences.

Political scientists rely heavily on survey research to gain insights into public attitudes and behaviors. Over the past decade, survey data collection has moved away from personal face-to-face and telephone interviewing towards a model of computer-assisted self-interviewing. A hallmark of many online surveys is the prominent display of the survey’s sponsor, most often an academic institution, in the initial consent form and/or on the survey website itself. It is an open question whether these displays of academic survey sponsorship could increase total survey error. We measure the extent to which sponsorship (by a university or marketing firm) affects data quality, including satisficing behavior, demand characteristics, and socially desirable responding. In addition, we examine whether sponsor effects vary depending on the participant’s experience with online surveys. Overall, we find no evidence that response quality is affected by survey sponsor or by past survey experience.

Scholars from across the social sciences argue that identities – such as race, ethnicity, and gender – are highly influential over individuals’ attitudes, actions, and evaluations. Experiments are becoming particularly integral for allowing identity scholars to explain how these social attachments shape our political behavior. In this letter, we draw attention to how identity scholars should approach the common practice of assessing moderators, measuring control variables, and detecting effect heterogeneity using covariates. Special care must be taken when deciding where to place measures of demographic covariates in identity-related experiments, as these cases pose unique challenges from how scholars traditionally approach experimental design. We argue in this letter that identity scholars, particularly those whose subjects identify as women or minorities, are often right to measure covariates of interest posttreatment.