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What explains why some survey respondents answer truthfully to a sensitive survey question, while others do not? This question is central to our understanding of a wide variety of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, but has remained difficult to investigate empirically due to the inherent problem of distinguishing those who are telling the truth from those who are misreporting. This article proposes a solution to this problem. It develops a method to model, within a multivariate regression context, whether survey respondents provide one response to a sensitive item in a list experiment, but answer otherwise when asked to reveal that belief openly in response to a direct question. As an empirical application, the method is applied to an original large-scale list experiment to investigate whether those on the ideological left are more likely to misreport their responses to questions about prejudice than those on the right. The method is implemented for researchers as open-source software.

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic is viewed by many as the biggest global crisis since WWII and had profound effects on the daily lives of people and decision-making worldwide. Using the pandemic as a system-wide agenda shock, we employ a difference-in-differences design to estimate its causal effects on inequalities in political access, and social media prominence among business interests and NGOs. Our argument is twofold. First, the urgency and uncertainty of crises incentivized decision-makers to privilege providing access to business groups over securing inclusivity in the types of interests consulted. Second, NGOs compensated by increasing prominence in public communications. Our analysis of data from over 10,000 interest groups from over 100 countries registered in the European Union supports these hypotheses. Business interests successfully capitalized on the crisis in insider access, while NGOs increased prominence on social media. The results have wider implications for understanding how large-scale crises affect inequalities in representation.

The development of methods to measure the ideological positions of legislators and other political actors has become one of the most successful research programs in the study of political behavior. Less effort, however, has been given to approaches for measuring public uncertainty about those positions. In this article, we propose the use of a well-known measurement model to investigate public uncertainty about the ideological locations of political actors. To motivate its use empirically, we examine citizens' perceptions of the ideology of Donald Trump during the 2016 election campaign. We show that among Republican and Democratic candidates since 1972, and compared to contemporary legislators, citizens have had the most difficulty assessing the ideology of Donald Trump. Our approach is widely applicable to questions concerning public perceptions of politicians' ideology and the political behavior of citizens and their representatives.

The insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, was the most dramatic contemporary manifestation of deep political polarization in the United States. Recent research shows that violent protests shape political behavior and attachments, but several questions remain unanswered. Using day-level panel data from a large sample of US social media users to track changes in the identities expressed in their Twitter biographies, we show that the Capitol insurrection caused a large-scale decrease in outward expressions of identification with the Republican Party and Donald Trump, with no indication of reidentification in the weeks that followed. This finding suggests that there are limits to party loyalty: a violent attack on democratic institutions sets boundaries on partisanship, even among avowed partisans. Furthermore, the finding that political violence can deflect copartisans carries the potential positive democratic implication that those who encourage or associate themselves with such violence pay a political cost.

ABSTRACTFor generations, scholars have used surveys to examine presidential greatness. However, the rising tide of politicization calls these ratings into question. Can those who study the presidency offer fair judgments regardless of their political affiliation? Does their affiliation alter judgments of presidential greatness in historical or contemporary terms? Using a 2018 expert survey of political scientists who study the presidency, we find that party affiliation and ideological differences do alter—albeit slightly—perceptions of presidential greatness for both past and present presidents up to and including Donald Trump. Our results call into question such ratings insofar as they exist absent the political and ideological context of the reviewer.

This paper investigates online propaganda strategies of the Internet Research Agency (IRA)—Russian "trolls"—during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We assess claims that the IRA sought either to (1) support Donald Trump or (2) sow discord among the U.S. public by analyzing hyperlinks contained in 108,781 IRA tweets. Our results show that although IRA accounts promoted links to both sides of the ideological spectrum, "conservative" trolls were more active than "liberal" ones. The IRA also shared content across social media platforms, particularly YouTube—the second-most linked destination among IRA tweets. Although overall news content shared by trolls leaned moderate to conservative, we find troll accounts on both sides of the ideological spectrum, and these accounts maintain their political alignment. Links to YouTube videos were decidedly conservative, however. While mixed, this evidence is consistent with the IRA's supporting the Republican campaign, but the IRA's strategy was multifaceted, with an ideological division of labor among accounts. We contextualize these results as consistent with a pre-propaganda strategy. This work demonstrates the need to view political communication in the context of the broader media ecology, as governments exploit the interconnected information ecosystem to pursue covert propaganda strategies.