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AbstractIn response to the Trump trade war, China, the EU, and other countries enacted politically-targeted trade retaliation (PTTR) against swing states and Republican strongholds in the United States. We argue that PTTR increases public concerns about foreign election interference and assess the effects of such retaliation across partisan affiliations. We test our predictions using a national survey experiment in the United States fielded before the 2020 election. In contrast to findings about sanctions and foreign endorsements, we find strong evidence that PTTR increases fears of election interference among both Republicans and Democrats. Partisan double standards in reaction to PTTR were strongest for retaliation targeting swing states and smaller for retaliation targeting the President's base. Overall, the evidence shows that economic policies which are not primarily intended to influence elections may nevertheless come to be viewed by the public as foreign election interference.

abstract: One of the central challenges in China-US relations is the risk of a security dilemma between China and the United States, as each side carries out actions for what it perceives to be defensively motivated reasons, failing to realize how they are perceived by the other side. Yet how susceptible to the psychological biases that undergird the security dilemma are the Chinese and American publics? Can these biases' deleterious effects be mitigated? The authors explore the microfoundations of the security dilemma, fielding parallel dyadic cross-national survey experiments in China and the United States. We find microlevel evidence consistent with the logic of the security dilemma in publics in both countries. We also find that international relations (ir) scholars have overstated the palliative effects of perspective-taking, which can backfire in the face of perceived threats to actors' identities and goals. The authors' findings have important implications for the study of public opinion in China-US relations and perspective-taking in ir.

"Experimentalists in political science often face a question about how abstract or concrete their experimental stimuli ought to be. Should they use real country (or candidate) names and include rich detail that greatly expands the length of their vignettes, or should they avoid the use of real names and embed their treatments in stark, abstract vignettes that highlight only the most necessary components of the experiment? Should they introduce their scenarios by describing them as hypothetical, or perhaps use deception and describe them as "real?" What, if any, are the consequences to these choices and should experimentalists weigh their options differently depending on what their goals are in a given study?"--

AbstractPolitical scientists designing experiments often face the question of how abstract or detailed their experimental stimuli should be. Typically, this question is framed in terms of trade‐offs relating to experimental control and generalizability: the more context introduced into studies, the less control, and the more difficulty generalizing the results. Yet, we have reason to question this trade‐off, and there is relatively little systematic evidence to rely on when calibrating the degree of abstraction in studies. We make two contributions. First, we provide a theoretical framework that identifies and considers the consequences of three dimensions of abstraction in experimental design: situational hypotheticality, actor identity, and contextual detail. Second, we replicate and extend three survey experiments, varying these levels of abstraction. We find no evidence that situational hypotheticality substantively changes results in any of our studies, but do find that increased contextual detail dampens treatment effects, and that the salience of actor identities moderates results in our endorsement experiment.