Public Opinion on Benjamin Lauderdale

Studying Individual-Level Attitudes Towards Important Problems Using Pairwise Comparisons

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How can we measure citizens’ attitudes towards political problems in a way that generates data which are comparable across individuals, across countries, and across time? In this paper, I show how to measure these attitudes using pairwise comparisons, such that the assessments can be used as either individual-level dependent or independent variables for subsequent analyses. Even where it is infeasible for respondents to answer sufficient pairwise comparisons to recover a respondent-level ranked order, model-based multiple imputation enables the analyses that would be possible if all respondents compared all possible pairs of categories. I validate this approach using assessments of political problems in the UK according to the categories of the Comparative Agendas Project. By enabling individual-level analysis on researcher-defined categories with accessible questions, these methods make supplementing or replacing the typical most important problem and issue questions asked on national election studies with pairwise comparisons broadly advantageous for future research.

Winning Votes and Changing Minds: Do Populist Arguments Affect Candidate Evaluations and Issue Preferences?

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Populist rhetoric – presenting arguments in people-centric, anti-elite and ‘good v. evil’ frames – is said to provide populist parties and candidates with an advantage in electoral competition. Yet, identifying the causal effect of populist rhetoric is complicated by its enmeshment with certain positions and issues. We implement a survey experiment in the UK (n≈9,000), in which hypothetical candidates with unknown policy positions randomly make (non-)populist arguments, taking different positions on various issues. Our findings show that, on average, populist arguments have a negative effect on voters’ evaluations of the candidate profiles and no effect on voters’ issue preferences. However, populist arguments sway voters’ issue preferences when made by a candidate profile that voters are inclined to support. Among voters with strong populist attitudes, populist arguments also do not dampen candidates’ electoral viability. These findings suggest that populist rhetoric is useful in convincing and mobilizing supporters but detrimental in expanding electoral support.

"Moderates"

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Many Americans express a mix of conservative and liberal views across issues. Prior research indicates these voters are cross-pressured. A recent, influential article “Moderates” (Fowler et al. 2023) argues that these voters instead largely have centrist views on issues. To reach this conclusion, “Moderates” develops a method to determine which voters’ views are well-summarized by left-right ideology. “Moderates” finds that most voters’ views are, and therefore concludes that the large number of voters with centrist estimated ideologies—“moderates”—must hold centrist views on issues. We show that this method systematically overstates how many voters’ views are well-summarized by left-right ideology: it assumes voters are ideologues unless they either answer questions randomly or form a single cluster with distinctive views. In simulations, we show this bias is large. The article’s core conclusion that voters who express a mix of conservative and liberal views can be inferred to support centrist policies therefore remains in doubt.

The Effects of Party Labels on Vote Choice with Realistic Candidate Differentiation

Wed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper we test how much party labels influence vote choices between candidates when voters have access to realistically distributed information about candidate positions and demographics. We do not seek to adjudicate a long-running debate about the role of party labels, but present some nuances on the two archetypal theoretical views on vote choices. We use data from the Representative Audit of Britain (RAB) and the British Elections Study (BES) to generate electoral match-ups between randomly selected Conservative versus Labour candidates, with only half of respondents seeing party labels in addition to candidates’ positions and demographics. For our experiment fielded in October 2021, we find negligible to moderate effects of party labels on vote choices. Our results suggest the information on candidate positions and party labels largely act as substitutes for one another, with only modest changes when party labels are made explicit.

Public Preferences over Changes to the Composition of Government Tax Revenue

Fri, 17 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How governments raise tax revenue is at the core of domestic political conflict. Public opinion towards taxation is measured generally and qualitatively by many surveys, but previous research has not closely linked public preferences to the budget problem faced by governments regarding how best to raise or cut a marginal quantity of revenue. We present results from a novel tax preference experiment in which UK respondents are given choices over different tax ‘levers’ that are expected to raise or cut equal revenue. We find that while different tax levers vary substantially in their popularity, there is a ‘hidden consensus’ regarding different tax levers across income levels and partisanship of the respondents.

The Variable Persuasiveness of Political Rhetoric

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Which types of political rhetoric are most persuasive? Politicians make arguments that share common rhetorical elements, including metaphor, ad hominem attacks, appeals to expertise, moral appeals, and many others. However, political arguments are also highly multidimensional, making it difficult to assess the relative persuasive power of these elements. We report on a novel experimental design which assesses the relative persuasiveness of a large number of arguments that deploy a set of rhetorical elements to argue for and against proposals across a range of UK political issues. We find modest differences in the average effectiveness of rhetorical elements shared by many arguments, but also large variation in the persuasiveness of arguments of the same rhetorical type across issues. In addition to revealing that some argument-types are more effective than others in shaping public opinion, these results have important implications for the interpretation of survey-experimental studies in the field of political communication.

A Leader Who Sees the World as I Do: Voters Prefer Candidates Whose Statements Reveal Matching Social-Psychological Attitudes

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Politicians are increasingly able to communicate their values, attitudes, and concerns directly to voters. Yet little is known about which of these signals resonate with voters and why. We employ a discrete choice experiment to investigate whether and which social-psychological attitudes predict how adult British voters respond to corresponding attitudinal signals communicated by candidates in hypothetical social media posts. For all attitudes studied, covering social feelings (trust, collective nostalgia), social perceptions (nationalism, populist sentiment), and social commitments (national identification, authoritarianism, egalitarianism), we find that participants are much more likely to vote for candidates who signal proximity to their own attitudinal position and less likely for candidates who signal opposing views. The strongest effects were observed for national identification, authoritarianism, and egalitarianism, indicating the importance of commitment to a shared group and to particular principles for distributing power and resources within and between groups. We further demonstrate that social-psychological attitudes are not acting as mere proxies for participants’ past votes or left–right ideology. Our results extend adaptive followership theory to incorporate preferences concerning intragroup coordination and intergroup hierarchy, while highlighting the social-psychological dynamics of political communication that may transcend the concerns of particular election cycles.

Measuring Attitudes towards Public Spending using a Multivariate Tax Summary Experiment

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It is difficult to measure public views on tradeoffs between spending priorities because public understanding of existing government spending is limited and the budgetary problem is complicated. We present a new measurement strategy using UK taxpayer summaries as the baseline for a continuous treatment, multivariate choice experiment. The experiment proposes deficit neutral bundles of changes in spending and taxation, allowing us to investigate attitudes towards modifications to the existing budget. We then use a structural choice model to estimate public preferences over 13 spending categories and the taxation level, on average and as a function of respondent attributes. We find that the UK public favours paying more in tax to finance large spending increases across major budget categories; that spending preferences are multidimensional; and that younger people prefer lower levels of taxation and spending than older people. Finally, we report a pre-registered out-of-sample validation of the estimates from the experiment.

Can Citizens Guess How Other Citizens Voted Based on Demographic Characteristics?

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

How well do citizens understand the associations between social groups and political divisions in their societies? Previous research has indicated systematic biases in how the demographic composition of party supporters are perceived, but this need not imply that citizens misperceive the likely voting behaviour of specific individuals. We report results from two experiments where subjects were provided with randomly selected demographic profiles of respondents to the 2017 British Election Study (BES) and then asked to assess either (1) which party that individual was likely to have voted for in the 2017 UK election or (2) whether that individual was likely to have voted Leave or Remain in the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership. We find that, despite substantial overconfidence in individual responses, on average citizens’ guesses broadly reflect the actual distribution of groups supporting the parties and referendum positions.

The Emergence of Coherent Political Choices from Incomplete Issue Preferences

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This working paper has been incorporated into our book Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion and Political Choice.

We provide the clearest evidence to date for an ‘issue publics’ account that reconciles conceptions of democracy premised on policy voting with longstanding evidence that citizens typically lack ‘real’, stable opinions on many policy issues. In this account, voters make coherent political choices based on the varying subsets of issues about which they as individuals care and form stable attitudes. Leveraging a novel three-wave panel survey experiment that repeatedly measures British respondents’ issue positions and their political choices between hypothetical candidates taking randomised issue positions, we provide the first direct evidence that higher opinion-stability issues have greater causal effect on citizens’ political choices. We then evidence hitherto untested issue publics implications: even restricted to issue-based considerations and given average issue opinion instability, individuals’ candidate choices are predictable and, when candidates contrast clearly on issues respondents’ care about, highly temporally stable. Aggregate issue opinion instability does not prohibit coherent issue voting.

Citizen Attitudes Towards National and International Problems (CATNIP)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

From September 2025 through August 2030, I am the primary investigator for a European Research Council Advanced Grant project Citizen Attitudes Towards National and International Problems (CATNIP). The initial stage of the project will seek to improve how political science measures which problems citizens think are most severe and most in need of their governments’ attention. The resulting advances in measurement will enable later stages of the project which will focus on improving our scientific understanding of where these attitudes come from and how they shape citizens’ views of media and politicians. One important application of this work will be characterising how (and which) voters prioritise international problems versus national problems, and the implications of this for how national political leaders engage internationally on questions of climate change, security, migration, and trade. As the project develops, I will post further details on this page.