Proposals to change the institutional features of national high courts have been on the agenda recently in the United States and Israel. Using insights about endowment effects and prospect theory from behavioral economics, we theorize about how citizens may think about benefits from high courts and how those views can influence their support for change to those institutions. Mindful of differences across these countries, we employ a comparative experimental design to explore how people think about personal and societal benefits emanating from the Israeli and United States Supreme Courts. We find interesting differences in how experimental participants think about benefits from courts and how those views shape feelings about recent proposals to alter judicial institutions in each national context.

Awareness of courts has long been theorized to engender enhanced support for judicial independence, but this is a logic that works only under the best of circumstances. We argue that interbranch politics influences what aware citizens know and learn about their court, and we theorize how awareness interacts with individual-level and context-dependent factors to bolster public endorsement of judicial independence in previously unappreciated ways. We fielded surveys in the United States (US), Germany, Poland, and Hungary, countries which diverge in the extent to which the environments are hospitable or hostile to high courts, and whose publics vary greatly in both their awareness of courts and perceptions of executive influence with the judiciary. We suggest that in hospitable contexts, awareness correlates with support for judicial independence, but said association depends on perceptions of executive influence. In hostile contexts where executive interference is common, more aware citizens are more apt to perceive this meddling, and although it might undermine trust in the judicial authority, it does not diminish their demand for judicial independence. Together, these findings underscore that public awareness and support for judicial independence are greatly informed by the political environment in which high courts reside.

This essay highlights the impact of Politics & Gender on the discipline’s understanding of how gender shapes the preferences, behavior, and motivations of voters. It provides descriptive information about the prevalence of research on gender and voting in the journal, along with the proportion of articles dedicated to women voters across different regions globally. The bulk of the essay focuses on the substance of this research — drawing out major themes and identifying significant contributions within each theme — and it concludes by offering a future research agenda on gender and voting.

Une littérature importante en politique canadienne porte sur le(s) régionalisme(s) à l’échelle du pays, mais les dynamiques régionales intraprovinciales demeurent sous-étudiées. Dans cet article, nous analysons la géographie politique de l'opinion publique au Québec, où l'accent a été mis sur le « mystère de Québec », selon lequel la région de Québec se distingue du reste de la province, par exemple, en affichant des tendances conservatrices plus marquées. Nous produisons l'analyse la plus détaillée à ce jour des variations régionales des attitudes politiques au Québec, en comparant l'électorat de treize régions. Nos résultats mettent en évidence des variations régionales importantes tout en précisant et nuançant notre compréhension du « mystère de Québec ». Par exemple, la région est plus conservatrice sur la dimension économique et moins favorable à l'indépendance du Québec, mais pas plus conservatrice sur les attitudes culturelles. Nous concluons en offrant une perspective renouvelée sur les études régionales, suggérant l'existence d'autres « mystères » régionaux au moins aussi importants.

Mass public opinion on globalization shows a persistent gender gap, but explanations for this gap differ. In the context of Africa, understanding this gender gap is particularly important because of women’s growing representation in legislatures and the rapid expansion of global economic flows on the continent. Why are women on average more skeptical of foreign economic actors? We consider this question across Sub-Saharan African countries, using Chinese economic engagement as a salient, visible form of economic globalization. Numerous studies have explored the impact of China’s presence on Africans’ attitudes toward China, but we know little about a documented gender gap in these attitudes. We explore the roots of this gap from an angle of economic vulnerability, positing that women at higher risk of a negative economic impact of Chinese engagement are more likely to view China negatively than their male counterparts. Using multilevel analyses of up to 84,000 respondents from up to 37 countries, we find a consistent pattern of economic vulnerability explaining the gender gap in attitudes, and factors associated with economic security mitigating it. Our findings suggest that economic vulnerability shapes attitudes differently across genders, and that increasing representation of women in African legislatures may have implications for policies toward Chinese engagement.

We conduct a survey experiment testing the causal link between ethical justifications and acceptability towards two environmental policies: conservation area expansion and wildlife infrastructure. In a 2 × 3 experiment with American participants (n = 1604), we test two ethical justifications – anthropocentric justification (nature as instrumentally valuable) and a non-anthropocentric justification (nature as intrinsically valuable) compared to a control group. We find partial support that non-anthropocentric justification increases policy acceptability compared to no justification. Contrary to expectations, non-anthropocentric justification leads to higher policy acceptability than anthropocentric justification. These results are robust to individual differences in political orientation and environmental concern. Additionally, participants in the non-anthropocentric experimental condition respond that similar conservation policies generally are, and should be, passed to benefit wildlife and ecosystems compared to control group participants. Likewise, participants given the anthropocentric justification report that similar policies are, and should be, passed for humans and society compared to the control group.

Malgré l'attention accordée à l'enjeu de la mésinformation au cours des dernières années, peu d’études ont examiné l'appui des citoyens pour les mesures visant à y faire face. À l'aide de données récoltées lors des élections québécoises de 2022 et de modèles par blocs récursifs, cet article montre que l'appui aux interventions contre la mésinformation est élevé en général, mais que les individus ayant une idéologie de droite, appuyant le Parti conservateur du Québec et n'ayant pas confiance dans les médias et les scientifiques sont plus susceptibles de s'y opposer. Ceux qui ne sont pas préoccupés par l'enjeu, priorisent la protection de la liberté d'expression ou adhèrent aux fausses informations y sont aussi moins favorables. Les résultats suggèrent que dépolitiser l'enjeu de la mésinformation et travailler à renforcer la confiance envers les institutions pourraient augmenter la légitimité perçue et l'efficacité de notre réponse face à la mésinformation.

Recent studies suggest that value orientations, both pro-environmental values and concerns and left–right ideology, strongly predict climate policy support in some settings, but not in others, and that institutional quality determines the strength of these associations. These studies are based on a limited number of countries and do not investigate the mechanisms at work nor what aspects of quality of government (QoG) matter more specifically. Analyzing data from 135 European regions across 15 countries, this paper finds that QoG moderates the relationships of pro-environmental values and left–right ideology with climate tax support and suggests that political trust is an underlying individual-level mechanism. Moreover, corruption seems to be the most important aspect of QoG for policy support. In regions where corruption is prevalent and trust in state institutions is low, support for climate taxes is low even among those who are generally concerned about the environment and climate change and who favor state intervention. The study suggests additional analyses, adopting quantitative and qualitative approaches, to inform policymakers on how to increase public support for climate taxation and improve policy designs to mitigate policy concerns across various segments of the population.

Under what conditions are people more likely to support judicial invalidation of legislative acts? We theorize that constitutional recency confers greater democratic legitimacy on constitutional provisions, reducing concerns that judges may use dated language to impose their own will on a living majority. Exploiting differences among US state constitutions, we show in a pre-registered vignette experiment and conjoint analysis that Americans are more supportive of judicial review and original intent interpretation when presented with a younger constitutional provision or constitution. These results imply that Americans might alter their approach to the US Constitution if it were changed as easily and as often as a typical state constitution.

Previous research has found that individuals harboring hostile sexist attitudes are more likely to support the use of political violence. In this study, we examine this relationship further. We theorize that the impact of hostile sexism on support for political violence is mediated through two mutually reinforcing factors: social dominance orientation and political illiberalism. We test this argument using an original survey we administered to over 1,400 subjects in the United States. We employ two operationalizations of individuals’ support for political violence: support in the abstract and support for specific acts of political violence. We find that individuals who exhibit hostile sexism are substantially more likely to support political violence, both abstract and specific. Moreover, we find that both social dominance orientation and political illiberalism together mediate 64.9% of the effect of hostile sexism on support for political violence in the abstract and 80.5% of the effect on support for specific acts of political violence. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings.

A large literature considers the mid-century a key turning point in punitive public opinion in the United States. This article examines racial and geographic heterogeneity in changing public opinion during the mid-century using data on death penalty support from as early as 1953. I find that the punitive turn is characterized by divergence in death penalty support between Black and White people, and that White Southerners grew more supportive than Whites in the non-South from before to after the turn. Additional tests identify that this regional divergence is unlikely to have arisen by chance. Heterogeneity in partisanship and responsiveness to regional violent crime support is consistent with the idea that crime rates themselves were meaningful in punitive attitude formation only insofar as they were mediated by additional socio-political forces.

Legal status is an important social determinant of health. Immigration enforcement policies may be an important contributor to health disparities in the form of interior border checkpoints (IBCs). These checkpoints may prevent immigrants and their families from seeking needed medical care. Currently, we do not know how these barriers are perceived by the public. We administered a survey of 6,178 respondents from 13 November to 19 November of 2023 that contained a survey experiment to assess public attitudes on the issue. Respondents were generally not supportive of detaining individuals at IBCs or medical facilities for emergencies regardless of characteristics of the care-seeking individual. A majority was supportive of detention when medical treatment was complete. Respondents were generally more sympathetic towards children and pregnant women. Partisanship and sympathy expressed towards immigrants influenced attitudes towards detention. Findings based on race and ethnicity showed inconsistencies. A majority of Americans did not believe that IBCs should impede undocumented immigrants from accessing medical care, especially in emergency situations and for children and pregnant women. Our findings indicate that there is broad public support for expanding existing policies to allow for undocumented individuals to pass through IBCs to access medical care.