In recent years, anti-refugee hate crimes have soared across Europe. We know this violence has spread fear among refugees, but we know less about its effects on the non-refugee population. This is an oversight, as research suggests political violence often has effects on the broader population. Those effects can range from increased solidarity with the targets of the violence to reduced pro-social behavior and less support for the targets of the violence. In this research note, we examine the effects of exposure to anti-refugee hate crimes in Germany. Our results suggest no direct effect of exposure to anti-refugee hate crimes on support for refugees. These results have several implications for our understanding of political divides over refugees in Europe.

Although influential models of public opinion hold that group sentiments play an important role in shaping political beliefs, they often assume that group attitudes stem from socialization and are thus exogenous to politics. We challenge this assumption, arguing that group attitudes may themselves be the consequence of political views. Across three survey experiments that each uses a unique social group–issue pair, we consistently demonstrate that attitudes toward groups are influenced by information about the groups' policy views. These findings persist even when accounting for potential partisan signaling. Altogether, these results show that group sentiments should not be regarded as wholly exogenous to policy concerns and suggest that the use of group-based heuristics can be consistent with instrumental models of public opinion.

There is a long-standing interest in how the visual appearance of politicians predicts their success. Usually, the scope of such studies is limited by the need for human-rated facial features. We instead fine-tune pre-trained image classification models based on convolutional neural networks to predict facial features of 7,080 Danish politicians. Attractiveness and trustworthiness scores correlate positively and robustly with both ballot paper placement (proxying for intra-party success) and the number of votes gained in local and national elections, while dominance scores correlate inconsistently. Effect sizes are at times substantial. We find no moderation by politician gender or election type. However, dominance scores correlate significantly with outcomes for conservative politicians. We discuss possible causal mechanisms behind our results.

Survey researchers testing the effectiveness of arguments for or against policies traditionally employ between-subjects designs. In doing so, they lose statistical power and the ability to precisely estimate public attitudes. We explore the efficacy of an approach often used to address these limitations: the repeated measures within-subjects (RMWS) design. This study tests the competing hypotheses that (1) the RMWS will yield smaller effects due to respondents' desire to maintain consistency (the “opinion anchor” hypothesis), and (2) the RMWS will yield larger effects because the researcher provides respondents with the opportunity to update their attitudes (the “opportunity to revise” hypothesis). Using two survey experiments, we find evidence for the opportunity to revise hypothesis, and discuss the implications for future survey research.

This study contributes to understanding mainstream parties' room for maneuver in the immigration domain by exploring the impact of moralization as a rhetorical strategy. Research has found anti-immigrant messages to be more effective than pro-immigrant messages in shaping public opinion. However, a pre-registered survey experiment with Danish respondents reveals that moral rhetoric enhances policy support for pro-immigrant communication, rendering it as effective as anti-immigrant messages. Partisan-motivated reasoning influences reactions to all messages except the non-moral anti-immigrant message, suggesting that when appealing to out-party supporters, mainstream parties still meet least resistance with an exclusive platform.

Networks among legislators shape politics and policymaking within legislative institutions. In past work on legislative networks, the ties between legislators have been defined on those who serve in the same legislature or chamber. Online information networks, which have been found to play important roles in legislative communication at the national level, are not bounded by individual legislative bodies. We collect original data for over four thousand US state legislators and study patterns of connection among them on Twitter. We look at three types of Twitter networks—follower, retweets, and mentions. We describe these networks and estimate the relationships between ties and salient attributes of legislators. We find that networks are organized largely along geographic and partisan lines and that identity attributes—namely gender and race—exhibit strong associations with the formation of ties.

Prominent recent work argues that support for democracy behaves thermostatically—that democratic erosion boosts democratic support while deepening democracy yields public backlash—and further contends that there is no evidence for the classic argument that democracy itself increases democratic support over time. Here, we document how these conclusions depend on subtle choices in measurement coding that constitute “researcher degrees of freedom”: analyses employing alternative reasonable choices provide little or no support for the original conclusions. The fragility of the statistical results demonstrates that researcher degrees of freedom in measurement must be taken seriously and that the question of the relationship between democratic institutions and democratic support remains unsettled.

Whether a topic is seen in a moral or moral-emotional light has significant political implications. Yet, we lack knowledge about the process of moralization: Who defines the way topics are communicated about? Where prior research has investigated the relative power of different actors to place a topic on the agenda or shape opinions, we study who sets the moral and moral-emotional tone of debate. To do so, we zoom in on immigration discourse in Germany and analyze fine-grained social media data from politicians, political parties, newspapers, and members of the public over a period of more than four years. After employing a transformer model to identify moral and moral-emotional appeals, we use structural vector autoregression models to demonstrate the important role of radical-right challengers in shaping public discourse in a negative moral-emotional direction. The results inform theories of moralization and political entrepreneurship.

Concerns over free riding in NATO are widespread. An intuitive approach to analyzing free riding is treating it as a systematic pattern of spatial interdependence between the allies: how does a NATO member's defense spending react to changes in other allies' military expenditures? While recent work has found statistically significant free riding (negative spatial interdependence in the outcomes), it suffers from important limitations. First, this research does not adequately account for temporal dependence. Second, it does not quantify the effect of interest. Accounting directly for temporal dependence provides a meaningfully distinct perspective on the within-alliance dynamics, demonstrating that the spatiotemporal effect of free riding is, in fact, more substantial than its short-run effect, challenging inferences of static spatial models. We discuss the relevant practical and theoretical implications.

Scholars often use monetary incentives to boost participation rates in online surveys. This technique follows existing literature from western countries, which suggests egoistic incentives effectively boost survey participation. Positing that incentives’ effectiveness vary by country context, we tested this proposition through an experiment in Australia, India, and the USA. We compared three types of monetary lotteries to narrative and altruistic appeals. We find that egoistic rewards are most effective in the USA and to some extent, in Australia. In India, respondents are just as responsive to altruistic incentives as to egoistic incentives. Results from an adapted dictator game corroborate these patterns. Our results caution scholars against exporting survey participation incentives to areas where they have not been tested.

In multiethnic societies, domestic minority groups are frequently associated with external adversaries. In such situations, external confrontations may potentially exacerbate internal ethnic conflict by increasing intolerance toward the domestic minority. Alternatively, they may result in rallying the public around a common superordinate national identity. We examine the case of India, which has a long-running rivalry with Muslim-majority Pakistan. Through a large (n = 7052) survey experiment, we find little evidence that a hypothetical crisis with Pakistan worsens attitudes toward India's large Muslim minority. Instead, we find that such a crisis may improve intergroup cohesion within India, improving tolerance towards Muslim minorities.