Benjamin Lauderdale on benjaminlauderdale.net

Studying Individual-Level Attitudes Towards Important Problems Using Pairwise Comparisons

Benjamin Lauderdale — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 UTC

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.

Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion and Political Choice

Benjamin Lauderdale — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 UTC

What is the nature of mass opinion on public policies? And what role do citizens’ policy opinions play in their political choices? This book re-examines these questions, which lie at the heart of fundamental debates concerning whether democratic elections can make policymakers responsive to citizens’ policy preferences. Prevailing answers to these questions tend to reflect one of two contrasting perspectives. The ‘ideological voter’ account suggests that citizens’ opinions across different policies are ideologically organised, so that political choice reduces to comparing positions on a small number of ideological dimensions. This simplifies democratic policy responsiveness. The ‘innocent voter’ account suggests that most citizens lack meaningful policy opinions on most issues. They express policy opinions that lack stability and ideological organisation, except where they simply mimic the policies espoused by the parties they support. This severely limits democratic policy responsiveness. This book argues for a third perspective: an ‘idiosyncratic voter’ account. This says that citizens develop meaningful policy opinions on different sets of issues, but the combinations of opinions they form on those issues are often idiosyncratic rather than ideologically organised. An analysis of panel survey data from Britain shows that both the ideological and innocent voter accounts do explain important aspects of mass policy opinion and political choice. Nonetheless, idiosyncratic policy opinion is also widespread and significantly shapes political choices. This means that idiosyncratic opinion serves alongside ideological opinion as an additional starting point for democratic policy responsiveness. Yet it also means that electoral politics is highly multidimensional and therefore volatile.

Inferring Individual Preferences from Group Decisions: Judicial Preference Variation and Aggregation in Asylum Appeals

Benjamin Lauderdale — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 UTC

While many democracies nominate partisan judges, empirical research has struggled to assess whether such judges adhere to Aristotle’s maxim that like cases should be treated alike. One fundamental problem hindering empirical research is that many courts only report decisions of panels, not the opinions of individual judges. We propose a methodology that tests which of several decision-theoretic models of group decision-making best fit the panel decisions, infers judges’ individual preferences, and quantifies the proportion of cases that would be decided differently if the courts’ consensus were consistently applied (an inconsistency rate). Applying this methodology to the Swiss asylum appeal process, where cases are assigned conditionally at random and have a common, unidimensional structure, we find a persistent inconsistency rate of about 5% due to variation in decision-making between judges, and that judges’ estimated preferences are correlated with party membership in expected ways.

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

Benjamin Lauderdale — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 UTC

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.

Polarization over the Priority of Political Problems

Benjamin Lauderdale — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 UTC

What drives ideological division about political problems? When prioritising which problems are most in need of redress, voters might disagree about the severity of individual outcomes that constitute such problems; the prevalence of those problems; or whether such problems are amenable to solution by government action. We field a large survey experiment in the UK and US and develop a new measurement approach which allows us to evaluate how ideological disagreements change when respondents consider the individual badness, social severity, and priority for government action of a set of 41 political problems. We find that large ideological divergences are observed in beliefs about social severity and priority for government action, not individual problem badness, and only in the US. An important implication of these results is that perceptions of problem prevalence are a key source of polarization over problem-prioritization in the US.

"Moderates"

Benjamin Lauderdale — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 UTC

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.

Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Very Similar Sets of Foundations When Comparing Moral Violations

Benjamin Lauderdale — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Applications of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) in political science have revealed differences in the degree to which liberals and conservatives explicitly endorse five core moral foundations of care, fairness, authority, loyalty and sanctity. We argue that differences between liberals and conservatives in their explicit ratings of abstract and generalized moral principles do not imply that citizens with different political orientations have fundamentally different moral intuitions. We introduce a new approach for measuring the importance of the 5 moral foundations by asking UK and US survey respondents to compare pairs of vignettes describing violations relevant to each foundation. We analyse responses to these comparisons using a hierarchical Bradley-Terry model which allows us to evaluate the relative importance of each foundation to individuals with different political perspectives. Our results suggest that, despite prominent claims to the contrary, voters on the left and the right of politics share broadly similar moral intuitions.

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

Benjamin Lauderdale — Wed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 UTC

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

Benjamin Lauderdale — Fri, 17 May 2024 00:00:00 UTC

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

Benjamin Lauderdale — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 UTC

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.