Research

Misinformation poses serious risks for democratic governance, conflict, and health. This study evaluates whether sustained, classroom-based education against misinformation can equip schoolchildren to become more discerning consumers of information. Partnering with a state government agency in Bihar, India, we conducted a field experiment in 583 villages with 13,500 students, using a 4-month curriculum designed to build skills, shift norms, and enhance knowledge about health misinformation. Intent-to-treat estimates demonstrate that treated respondents were significantly better at discerning true from false information, altered their health preferences, relied more on science, and reduced their dependence on unreliable news sources. We resurveyed participants 4 months post-intervention and found that effects persisted, as well as extended to political misinformation. Finally, we observe within-household treatment diffusion, with parents of treated students becoming more adept at discerning information. As many countries seek long-term solutions to combat misinformation, these findings highlight the promise of sustained classroom-based education.

Elections are the key mechanism through which voters hold elected officials accountable. The partisan composition of local, state, and federal governments, in turn, shapes policy choices and public goods provision. Yet studying representation, government responsiveness, and partisan politics across multiple levels of government—especially at the local level—has been difficult due to inconsistently reported, incomplete, or insufficiently harmonized election data at small geographic scales. This paper introduces GERDA (https://www.german-elections.com/), a panel dataset of local, state, and federal election results in Germany at the municipality level spanning the past three decades. GERDA includes turnout and vote shares for all major parties and resolves challenges arising from municipal boundary changes and joint mail-in voting districts, yielding a consistent panel of municipalities in their 2021 boundaries. We also provide municipal and county boundary shapefiles to facilitate spatial analyses. Our dataset enables new research on partisan politics, policy responsiveness, and political representation at fine-grained geographic scales and over time.

How can political elites strengthen citizen commitment to democratic norms when democracy is under imminent assault? We report results from a pre-registered survey experiment on the persuasive effects of actual speeches given by prominent Republican politicians (Schwarzenegger, McConnell) shortly after the January 2020 insurrection at the U.S. capitol. Although both speeches were widely considered effective at the time, in a survey experiment among Republican voters, we find no impact of one-time exposure to these speeches on the endorsement of democracy, the acceptance of election losses, the rejection of political violence, or the relevance of democratic norms in hypothetical vote choices.

This paper adapts Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) prospect theory for the electoral context in an attempt to elucidate some of the psychological processes underlying the rise of populism. Building on existing theories of recent populist successes in advanced Western democracies, it argues that cultural, economic, and political changes have created a ‘loss mindset’amongst certain demographics, which have led those demographics to associate the continuation of the post-2008 status quo with the acceptance of a certain loss. Due to individuals’ strong psychological aversion against certain losses and their tendency to discount large losses, voters with such a mindset are more likely to vote for a risky candidate who promises political discontinuity over a candidate who represents the continuation of the status quo. Empirical support for the theory that a loss mindset can lead to risk-seeking electoral behavior is established by analyzing the 2016 US presidential election through a combination of individual-level survey data from the ANES 2016 Time Series Study and an assembled county-level dataset. Using cluster and factor analysis, the paper establishes robust support for the hypotheses that arise from adopting the prospect theoretical model for the 2016 election. Specifically, it finds that: (1) having a loss mindset is associated with a significant increase in support for Trump; (2) the effect of intermediate assessments of change is significantly more pronounced in the domain of losses than in the domain of gains; and (3) highly negative assessments are comparatively less politically salient than highly positive assessments. These findings help explain the appeal that anti-establishment populists hold for economically,culturally, and politically disenfranchised voters. Furthermore, this paper highlights why alarmist warnings by theestablishment are often ineffective at countering populist rhetoric.