Voters regularly face financially diverse candidate pools, yet electoral winners tend to be much wealthier than the challengers. What role do public preferences play in this over-representation of wealth? We posit three channels: direct preference for wealthy candidates, indirect preference due to in-group biases, or inadvertent preference due to ignorance about candidate wealth. Drawing on original surveys in the United States, Brazil, Chile, and India, and leveraging conjoint and information experiments, we find that when given information about wealth, the public exhibits a strong preference against wealthier candidates. While the public grossly underestimates the true wealth of politicians, correcting such misperceptions does not significantly change the preferences over candidate wealth. On the margin, the public uses wealth as a proxy for other desirable qualities like skill, but such an inferential shortcut does not boost public sentiments. Partisan bias, however, may produce some indirect support for the wealthy.

Questions about race and representation often hinge on the public’s beliefs about which policies affect different communities, yet there is limited evidence on how these associations are actually perceived. Using a nationally representative survey experiment, we examine how the issue priorities of political candidates shape perceptions of who they represent. Most policy areas are perceived to benefit White Americans; only a few, especially criminal justice and poverty, are strongly associated with African Americans. We also show that perceptions of candidate ideology and race correlate with perceptions of Black representation, but mediation analysis reveals that criminal justice is associated with Black representation above and beyond ideological inferences. Finally, analyzing nearly 200,000 congressional newsletters and find that while race is rarely explicitly mentioned, Black Americans are most frequently referenced in the context of criminal justice and poverty. Together, these results underscore how race-policy associations operate through both public perception and elite messaging, shaping broader understandings of political representation.

Second-order beliefs – what political actors think others think – can shape agenda-setting and even shift public opinion. Because of the collective-action nature of mitigating human-caused climate change, such second-order political beliefs are particularly important to study. Through an innovative survey design focusing on a policy proposal to introduce meat-free days in canteens, we present the first simultaneous comparison of ordinary citizens’, locally elected political representatives’, and centrally employed public administrators’ own opinions and their ability to accurately identify the majority position of citizens. While citizens are split in their opinion on meat-free days in canteens, a clear majority of unelected elites support it, and most elected elites do not support this policy. Nonetheless, we find that all three groups tend to underestimate the level of policy support among citizens. Through rigorous analysis, we show that elected elites are significantly more likely to underestimate public support for a meat-free day compared to citizens and unelected elites. These results provide important insights into the dynamics of democratic governance and suggest that underestimation of citizens’ support for climate policies may further complicate an already challenging policy area.

Stress is a response to external environmental conditions that encourages individuals to pursue changes in their lives. We examine the relationship between stress and federal and provincial political leaders’ approval ratings. We theorize that, as a strategy to cope with the pandemic stresses outside of their direct control, individuals will redirect their frustrations toward incumbents. We hypothesize that greater experiences with stress will negatively correlate with the approval of political incumbents even among members of incumbents’ political in-group. We analyze data from the COVID-19 Monitor survey, a multi-wave, cross-sectional survey of over 56,000 Canadians. On three out of four measures, we find that stress negatively impacted incumbent approval, and that these negative impacts occur among the incumbent’s supporters and non-supporters. On the fourth measure, we find the effect of stress on approval is moderated, positive or negative, by whether regional leaders took action to limit the spread of coronavirus disease 2019.

Does the public accurately perceive how views change in society? Prevailing narratives suggest not, but we argue this conclusion stems from searching for the wrong kind of accuracy—demanding pollster-like precision instead of acknowledging the public’s robust perception of the ‘gist’ of change. Re-analyzing three large studies (total N = 2,236), we show that collective perceptions of change are incredibly consistent across different measurement methods (r > 0.90) and, critically, are highly aligned with actual historical data (r > 0.70). This collective wisdom is underpinned by a robust, individual-level ability to perceive the direction and relative force of these shifts. Moreover, there is a clear pattern to the minority of attitudes for which perceptions of change were inaccurate. We conclude that the public possesses a robust gist-based judgment that accurately tracks how various political attitudes have changed.

What do people in liberal polities believe they owe soldiers for their service? The UK’s Armed Forces Covenant, promulgated in 2000 and enshrined in law in 2021, presents a real-world opportunity to examine the effects of inducing citizens to reflect on soldiering. We develop and test two contending theoretical logics, grounded in the liberal political culture from which the Covenant emerged, using unique observational data and a novel survey experiment. Does prior knowledge of the Covenant or exposure to a Covenant prime highlight the abiding tensions between liberal ideals and military service and underscore the debt that citizens owe soldiers? Or does it prompt liberal citizens to resolve their discomfort with military service in a distinctively liberal way – by emphasising soldiers’ contractual terms and their willing consent to deployment? In line with the latter logic, respondents with prior knowledge of the Covenant or exposure to the Covenant prime were more likely to endorse the use of force and were less sensitive to casualties, and they were no more likely to grant soldiers and veterans additional benefits or preferential treatment. This paper has significant implications for public support for military missions and the relationship between military service and citizenship.

Does religious affiliation affect evaluations of the president’s policy performance? We examine support for President Barack Obama’s handling of seven policy areas using data from the Pew Research Center. We show that the intersection of race/ethnicity and religion drives support for Obama’s policy performance and that religion’s impact transcends that of partisanship. Compared to Black Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, non-Hispanic Catholics, and (to a lesser extent) seculars and mainline Protestants are significantly less approving of Obama’s policy performance. The most striking result in this study concerns the differences between Black Protestants and evangelicals, as the latter group is consistently opposed to Obama’s handling of policy, whether domestic or international. Taken together, our findings reveal that the political significance of religious affiliation on presidential policy approval intersects powerfully with race/ethnicity.

This essay examines how Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman draws on and revises key themes from Adam Smith’s moral philosophy. While Smith is often seen as a theorist of sympathy and market society, Wollstonecraft engages with his ideas to develop a distinctive critique of women’s social and moral subordination. I highlight how she reworks Smith’s account of moral development to emphasize the formative role of adversity, independence, and judgment—particularly in shaping female character. In doing so, Wollstonecraft also challenges the ideals of femininity promoted in contemporary conduct literature, exposing how they hinder moral agency and reinforce dependence. The analysis shows how she reimagines the moral conditions of modern society and offers an early feminist response to both commercial and sentimental conceptions of virtue.

A large body of research shows that members of Congress disproportionately represent the interests of copartisans and affluent Americans. Is there also racial disparity in representation? I draw on three standards of political equality—proportionality, race-conscious egalitarianism, and pluralism—and assess the extent to which minority representation satisfies each. To do so, I match roll-call votes in the U.S. House of Representatives to survey data fielded prior to each vote (2006–2016) and use multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate racial subgroups’ opinions. I then examine how closely House members’ voting aligns with these opinions, focusing on districts where White and minority preferences differ. My analysis rules out “coincidental representation’ driven by similar opinions across groups and accounts for how much of each racial group’s national population resides in each district. Among districts where racial group opinions differ, I find strong support for the proportionality over the race-conscious egalitarian standard: Racial minority representation is substantially greater in majority–minority districts than in those that are not. However, I find strong evidence for the race-conscious egalitarian standard among Democratic legislators and moderate evidence for the pluralist standard among all legislators, as voting tends to align with racial minority opinion on explicitly race-targeted bills.

For more than 150 years, politicians, the federal government, and missionary churches misled Canadians about deaths, abuse, and the genocidal intent in residential schools for Indigenous children. More recently, the identification of suspected unmarked graves at former school sites has triggered a renewed spread of misinformation denying the harmful legacy of residential schools. To what extent does the Canadian public endorse residential school denialism? Can education counter this misinformation? In this study, we develop and test a scale for measuring residential school denialism. We find that nearly one in five non-Indigenous Canadians agree with denialist claims, while an equal share feel they do not know enough to offer an opinion. Denialist beliefs are more common among men, conservatives, those with anti-Indigenous attitudes, and white Canadians who strongly identify with their racial in-group. In an experiment, we also show that educational information reduces non-opinions and increases the likelihood of rejecting denialist arguments.

Individuals who particularly like or dislike a president or presidential candidate may, through a process of motivated reasoning, personally support or oppose the politician’s policy positions as a consequence. I examine the extent to which attitudes toward Donald Trump shaped public opinion on immigration policy, a case that appears to invite motivated reasoning. I estimate the influence of attitudes about Trump by comparing them directly to views of Barack Obama and trade policy using large reputable national surveys. I find a material, if limited, Trump effect. Trump polarized Americans on immigration considerably. However, the polarization was not along racial or ethnic lines. Moreover, any Trump effect on immigration appears not to have been as large as that he brought to bear on trade. Contrary to some recent work, such an effect also appears to have elevated immigration only marginally in the list of those deemed important.

While abortion has been a contentious and salient political issue in the United States for decades, the debate around abortion has evolved in terms of the rhetorical frames employed by advocates on both sides. Using vignettes of statements made by hypothetical lawmakers, we evaluate responsiveness to some of these emergent frames. Specifically, we evaluate “pro-woman” framing employed by pro-life advocates, which positions abortion restrictions as being in the interests of women. The experiment also manipulates to whom the frame is attributed in two ways, the gender and the partisanship of the lawmaker. This 2 × 2 × 2 experiment explores the intersection of how abortion restrictions are framed, including the roles gender and partisanship in the persuasiveness of the frames. We find that voters are more receptive to the pro-woman frame compared to the classic fetal rights framing. Importantly, this holds even among supporters of abortion rights, casting substantial light on persuadable groups.