Conjoint Survey Experiment Research Articles

Morality meets menu: investigating the impact of moral appeals on vegetarianism through a conjoint survey experiment

Morality meets menu: investigating the impact of moral appeals on vegetarianism through a conjoint survey experiment

Threat Construction and Coercive Credibility

How do actors issue credible threats during international crises? While scholarship has traditionally focused on how the context of threats influences credibility, this paper considers how the construction of the threat itself affects credibility. More specifically, this paper introduces the concept of threat justification and theorize how the choice of explanation a leader uses in communicating her threats can influence her coercive credibility. This study employs a conjoint design survey experiment to identify the influence of threat specificity and severity, public versus private threats, and threat justification on perceptions of credibility. This paper finds that more precise threats are perceived as more credible, while threats employing reputational justifications are less credible. There is a minimal amount of evidence that the public versus private delivery of a threat influences credibility. This paper also finds that perceptions of credibility are influenced by whether the audience is domestic versus international and by the severity of the instigating crisis trigger. This study furthers our understanding of the factors shaping coercive credibility and how policymakers can most effectively convey their commitments during international crises.

Which job attributes attract individuals high in public service motivation and self‐efficacy to a public service job?

AbstractWhich job attributes attract prospective high‐performing individuals to a job in the public sector? Research shows that the particular attributes of a job influence perceptions of job attractiveness. Moreover, public service motivation (PSM) and self‐efficacy are valuable individual‐level traits for public service performance. This article examines how variation within particular job attributes that are generic to many public service jobs may attract (or discourage) potential workers high in PSM and self‐efficacy—i.e., prospective high‐performers. We focus on eight job attributes encompassing total compensation, performance‐based incentives, job performance assessment, diverse service recipient characteristics, overtime commitments, and key job tasks. Using data from a pre‐registered conjoint survey experiment among 1501 US residents, we show how individuals higher in PSM and self‐efficacy (relative to their counterparts with lower levels of these traits) exhibit distinct reactions to the job attributes of performance‐based pay, service recipients’ resources and racial demographics, and key job tasks.

Public attitudes towards co-ethnic migrant integration: evidence from South Korea

ABSTRACT What can public attitudes towards the integration of co-ethnic migrants teach us about social integration in newly diverse societies? Research finds that South Koreans prefer co-ethnic migrants from culturally similar or desirable origins, but it says little about the integration of migrant groups. Existing data and qualitative studies suggest considerable barriers to fully incorporating otherwise preferred migrants. Focusing on integrating North Korean migrants in South Korea – a relatively privileged migrant group that enjoys substantial resettlement support but encounters barriers to full integration – this paper addresses the research gap by testing competing explanations of migrant incorporation. Informed by Intergroup Threat Theory (ITT), the study examines how threats defined as realistic or symbolic shape native attitudes toward these migrants. Using a conjoint survey experiment to measure preferences for economic, political, and social integration, we find South Koreans favor North Korean migrants with extended residence in South Korea, which is a marker for diminishing realistic and symbolic intergroup threats. Conversely, migrants signaling stronger affiliations to North Korea or lacking diverse social ties in South Korea fail to alleviate intergroup threat concerns and consequently face discrimination. Our findings offer insights into integration policy and contribute to the migration and citizenship literature and contemporary Korean Studies.

Like parent, like child: how attitudes towards immigrants spill over to the political inclusion of their children

ABSTRACT Across Europe, citizenship is traditionally attributed at birth through descent only. As immigrant populations grow, policy-makers have come under pressure to extend citizenship rights to the children of immigrants born in the country. While such inclusive measures often counter political opposition, public attitudes on this question remain remarkably underexplored. In this study, we report on the results of an original choice-based conjoint survey experiment designed to examine which parental attributes affect respondents’ willingness to grant citizenship to newborns. We implement the survey experiment in Italy, where over one million children do not have Italian citizenship, yet reform proposals have so far been unsuccessful. In line with our pre-registered expectations, we find that respondents are more likely to support birthright citizenship for children born to parents who are economically, legally and socially integrated in society. These attitudes vary little by political background, education and age-category of respondents. Our findings suggest that incorporating immigration-related conditionality in birthright citizenship proposals is key to convincing sceptical publics of the legitimacy of such measures.

How to finance green investments? The role of public debt

Economic costs are a central political obstacle to investing in climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. Several studies now demonstrate that as costs increase, voters are less likely to support green initiatives. In this paper we argue that opposition to government green investments is conditional on the method of financing. Notably, because public debt shifts the burden of investments into the future, it may face less public opposition than broad based taxes that require an immediate sacrifice. To test this proposition, we fielded a preregistered conjoint survey experiment on nationally representative samples in one highly indebted (Italy) and one fiscally sound country (The Netherlands). We find debt financing increases voter support for green financing by up to 10 percentage points relative to broad-based taxes. However, we find carbon taxes and wealth taxes are most preferred. These findings demonstrate that credit market tools, like green bonds and debt for climate swaps, are likely politically efficient and not just economically efficient. Where investments are already financed with debt, the findings suggest that political communication can limit a political backlash to green investments. Most importantly, the findings show that the political opposition to paying for green investments can be circumvented.

Celebrating Differences: A Conjoint Analysis of Senior Year Mechanical Engineering Students’ Occupational Preferences

AbstractGiven its ongoing struggles at attaining demographic diversity and its key role in nations’ economies, the engineering workforce receives considerable attention from researchers and policymakers. Yet, prior studies and STEM recruitment initiatives have often underemphasized the variety among available engineering jobs and careers. It therefore remains unclear which attributes of engineering work are most salient in shaping students’ choices to persist in or depart from engineering pathways. This study introduces a novel conjoint survey experiment conducted with over 1000 senior year mechanical engineering students. This randomized experiment allows the authors to disentangle supply-side and demand-side factors to assess engineering job attributes’ marginal influences on students’ occupational preferences, as well as to examine these attributes’ interaction effects with supply-side factors. Toward strengthening persistence in engineering pathways, findings suggest that broad STEM recruitment initiatives, though potentially advantageous in pre-college years, should give way to more targeted campaigns that increase university students’ awareness about key dimensions of variety across engineering work roles.

Residential preferences, place alienation, and neighborhood satisfaction: A conjoint survey experiment in Toronto’s inner suburbs

ABSTRACT In this article, we study neighborhood preferences among residents of highly diverse, lower income suburban neighborhoods in Toronto, Ontario. By extending the typical application of conjoint designs to the urban domain, we show techniques for measuring place alienation—a sense of disconnection from place—and its impact on neighborhood satisfaction. We find that residents in lower SES neighborhoods share many of the same priorities as residents in higher SES neighborhoods when it comes to safety, transit, school quality, neighborliness, public spaces, and building types. However, differences appear across a range of preferences including bike usage, local commercial spaces, and cultural and recreation facilities. When considering place alienation and neighborhood satisfaction, we find a consistent, robust inverted relationship—as place alienation decreases, neighborhood satisfaction increases. Moreover, this relationship is not mitigated by socioeconomic factors, neighborhood conditions, or even attitudinal and experiential factors. We end with suggestions for future research.

International Rewards for Gender Equality Reforms in Autocracies

How do international audiences perceive, and respond to, gender equality reforms in autocracies? For autocrats, the post-Cold War rewards associated with democracy create incentives to make reforms that will be viewed as democratic but not threaten their political survival. We theorize women’s rights as one such policy area, contrasting it with more politically costly reforms to increase electoral competition. A conjoint survey experiment with development and democracy promotion professionals demonstrates how autocracies enhance their reputations and prospects for foreign aid using this strategy. While increasing electoral competition significantly improves perceived democracy and support for aid, increasing women’s economic rights is also highly effective. Gender quotas exhibit a significant (though smaller) effect on perceived democracy. A follow-up survey of the public and elite interviews replicate and contextualize the findings. Relevant international elites espouse a broad, egalitarian conception of democracy, and autocrats accordingly enjoy considerable leeway in how to burnish their reputations.

Judicial reasoning, individual cultural types, and support for COVID‐19 vaccine mandates

AbstractWith heated political and public debate over government vaccine mandates, COVID‐19 offers an opportunity to better understand the role of policy justifications on people's perceptions towards a policy. Through this study, we aim to move beyond the partisan and ideological arguments for and against vaccine mandates to illustrate how individuals' worldviews, based on Cultural Theory, can better explain why people have different perceptions towards vaccine mandates. Using the judiciary and judicial reasoning as the setting, and controlling for individuals' preexisting opinion on COVID‐19 vaccines, we hypothesize that people who prefer vaccine mandates will agree with judicial reasoning that appeals towards individualistic and hierarchical statements. Additionally, we hypothesize that those who have confidence in the judiciary will agree with individualistic and hierarchical statements. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a conjoint survey experiment through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results confirm the hypotheses.

Bringing the Ts and (N)Bs to the Table: Estimating Intersectional Candidate Gender Identity and Sexuality Effects on Vote Choice

ABSTRACT Research has shown that LGBTQ+ candidates continue to face penalties at the ballot box, with particularly acute penalties for transgender candidates. However, the nuanced intersection of gender identity and sexual orientation has yet to be explored. Our project endeavors to do just that, by differentiating between transgender men, transgender women, and non-binary candidate gender identities, as well as including bisexual candidate sexual orientation. Our conjoint survey experiment finds, contrary to our expectations, that transgender women candidates do not face larger vote penalties than transgender men candidates, though candidates of either identity are more penalized than cisgender women and non-binary candidates. Also contrary to our expectations but in line with recent research, we find that bisexual men candidates (cis or transgender) are penalized more than bisexual women candidates (cis or transgender). Understanding the intersectionality of candidate gender identity and sexual orientation is critical for developing strategies to increase LGBTQ+ political representation.

What Makes a Citizen? Contemporary Immigration and the Boundaries of Citizenry

Abstract How do native-born Americans evaluate citizenship claims made by immigrant groups? Prior research identifies three broad patterns: respondents (1) make judgments based on immigrants’ willingness to adhere to national norms and civic values, (2) rely on ethnoracial cues, and (3) rely on economic cues. Using a conjoint survey experiment, this is the first study to examine how these patterns hold across two distinct dimensions of citizenship—legal membership (being considered a citizen of the state) and cultural membership (being perceived as a fellow American). The results reveal that legal status and age of arrival are powerful determinants for attitudes toward legal membership. By contrast, ethnoracial boundaries have a more significant impact on cultural membership, even after accounting for key predictors, such as legal status and English proficiency. Moreover, we show that evaluations of citizenship claims differ for White and non-White Americans in meaningful ways. Compared to White respondents, Black and Latino respondents express higher levels of ingroup preference for legal membership, and Latinos are significantly more likely to use an inclusive definition of cultural membership. In tandem, these results highlight the importance of measuring citizenship as a multidimensional concept and the limitations of focusing on the dominant group to understand immigration attitudes in contemporary diverse societies.

Beyond Pandering: Investment Project Quality, Voter Support, and the Use of Investment Incentives

AbstractWhy are politicians selective in granting investment incentives to foreign direct investment (FDI) projects? One understudied reason is that politicians want to minimize backlash from voters. In this article, I present the first study to systematically analyze voter preferences toward investment incentives. I theorize that voters should be more likely to support investment incentives for FDI projects that they perceive as “high quality”—that is, projects that voters perceive to be highly effective in improving the living standards of their communities. As a result, I expect that politicians who support low-quality FDI projects with incentives will lose voter support. A factorial survey experiment in the United States provides evidence in favor of this argument. Voters reward politicians only if they provide investment incentives to high-quality projects. An additional conjoint survey experiment highlights the importance of project characteristics that indicate high quality in increasing the approval of investment incentives. To demonstrate the external validity of these experimental results, I present descriptive evidence that illustrates the consistencies between the determinants of investment incentives for FDI projects and voter preferences.

Key predictors for climate policy support and political mobilization: The role of beliefs and preferences

Public support and political mobilization are two crucial factors for the adoption of ambitious climate policies in line with the international greenhouse gas reduction targets of the Paris Agreement. Despite their compound importance, they are mainly studied separately. Using a random forest machine-learning model, this article investigates the relative predictive power of key established explanations for public support and mobilization for climate policies. Predictive models may shape future research priorities and contribute to theoretical advancement by showing which predictors are the most and least important. The analysis is based on a pre-election conjoint survey experiment on the Swiss CO2 Act in 2021. Results indicate that beliefs (such as the perceived effectiveness of policies) and policy design preferences (such as for subsidies or tax-related policies) are the most important predictors while other established explanations, such as socio-demographics, issue salience (the relative importance of issues) or political variables (such as the party affiliation) have relatively weak predictive power. Thus, beliefs are an essential factor to consider in addition to explanations that emphasize issue salience and preferences driven by voters’ cost-benefit considerations.

U.S. Sanctuary Policies and Mexicans’ Migration Preferences: A Conjoint-Experimental Study

The debate on immigration policy and enforcement in the United States often revolves around the phenomenon of sanctuary cities. While past research accounts for Americans’ attitudes toward sanctuary cities and the effects of sanctuary policies on immigrant and Latino communities, less is known about how potential migrants factor sanctuary status into moving choices. We implement a conjoint survey experiment in Mexico, in which we ask respondents to rate the attractiveness of hypothetical localities in the United States described in terms of several attributes, including immigration enforcement policies. Results show that sanctuary status increases the attractiveness of potential immigration destinations in the United States. However, its effect is overshadowed by preferences for localities with many jobs and low crime rates, as well as ones that voted for Biden in 2020. Despite emphasis on sanctuary cities in U.S. political rhetoric, sanctuary policies only modestly increase the attractiveness of destinations for potential migrants.

Graduate migration, partisanship, and city preferences: An experimental approach to place‐consonant migration decisions

AbstractHow do university students evaluate prospective jobs in different cities after graduation? While the literature has identified drivers of graduate migration, research has yet to account for the role of individual social and political attitudes in shaping destination preferences. Using a conjoint survey experiment, this paper introduces the concept of place‐consonant migration to describe the desire for proximity to like‐minded communities with respect to political partisanship. Building on research that has established the utility of experiments in evaluating complex migration decision‐making, we provided University of North Carolina at Charlotte undergraduate students with hypothetical job packages to consider upon graduation which combined the city names with randomised levels of income and amenity factors. Adapting to rapidly changing social and political dynamics, we conducted the experiment across three cross‐sections of students to capture the potential impact of the Covid‐19 pandemic and other social and political developments on the migration decisions of college graduates. The analysis demonstrates how place characteristics combine with individual partisan attitudes to produce place‐consonant migration preferences among students. Moreover, by conducting multiple waves of our experiment during contemporaneous social and political events, our results show that place‐consonant preferences change over time.

The Tripwire Effect: Experimental Evidence Regarding U.S. Public Opinion

AbstractClaims about the deterrent role of forward military deployments often depend on the argument that attacks on troops stationed abroad will activate a “tripwire effect.” It is assumed that this effect would generate strong domestic pressure for further military intervention by the country whose troops have come under attack. In theory, the anticipation of a strong tripwire effect prospectively ties the hands of leaders, thereby bolstering the reliability of extended deterrent threats and promises. In this paper, we define the tripwire effect and use both conjoint and vignette survey experiments to evaluate its operation and magnitude among Americans. Results suggest that the tripwire effect is, at best, far weaker than many analysts and policymakers commonly assume. This finding raises serious questions about a core logic underpinning the United States’ forward military posture and highlights the need for more research on the deterrent functions of forward deployment.

Individual preferences toward inward foreign direct investment: A survey experiment

In democratic societies, public attitudes toward foreign direct investment (FDI) can influence FDI policy as in other policy areas but have been largely ignored in FDI literature. To bridge this gap, we investigate individual preferences toward inward FDI. We employ a conjoint (vignette) survey experiment and analyze the determinants of preferences toward acquisitions by foreign firms. Conjoint survey experiments allow us to simultaneously estimate the effects of various attributes of foreign acquisitions, enabling us to analyze the complex causal relationships between various attributes of an acquisition project and people’s antipathy toward it. The results of the experiment show that the nationality of the foreign firm, reciprocity, and the economic conditions of the location of the firm being acquired are important factors. The subgroup analysis shows that older respondents and women are more negative about inward FDI. We also employ the gravity equation and confirm that our survey results are in line with the actual pattern of inward FDI stock.

Are Leadership Preferences Gendered? A Conjoint Analysis of Employee Preferences for Manager Characteristics in Male- and Female-Dominated Public Sub-Sectors in the Netherlands

This article examines the consequences of stereotypical beliefs regarding gender, traits, and leadership styles for manager preferences in public organizational contexts that differ as to the gender composition of their workforce. It is hypothesized that employee preferences for male, agentic, and/or transactional managers relative to female, communal, and/or transformational managers are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts. Hypotheses are tested through a conjoint survey experiment among 2,757 Dutch public sector employees in education, police, and defense. Findings show that there is a stronger preference for communal managers over agentic managers in both contexts, independent of the manager’s gender. In contrast, employee preferences for transactional leadership relative to transformational leadership are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts and vice versa, also independent of the gender of the manager. The article discusses the implications of the study’s findings for the study of gender and leadership preferences.

Exploring the impact of awareness on public acceptance of emerging energy technologies: An analysis of the oil palm industry

The adoption of renewable energy technology and the resolution of sustainability challenges hinge on public acceptance. This study explored the public's acceptance of power generation utilizing recycled oil palm waste, a nascent and innovative technology, to discern the impact of increased public awareness on the approval of potentially contentious scientific technology. Through a combined conjoint survey and information treatment experiment, participants from three Northeast Asian countries, Japan (n = 1513), China (n = 1565), and South Korea (n = 1514) were randomly exposed to various sets of potentially controversial information. Results indicated that the public's acceptance of this technology was comparable to solar power in Japan and South Korea and surpassing other energy sources in China at a general knowledge level. The findings reveal that acceptance was higher at a general knowledge level as opposed to when participants were more informed, though well-informed participants did not necessarily reject the emerging controversial technology. Raising public awareness about palm oil generally reduced acceptance of the utilization of recycled oil palm waste. Public support increased with multiple pieces of information rather than single pieces of information. Unexpectedly, the information provisions increased public support of other non-fossil fuel sources such as nuclear and solar power. These results suggest that the nature and volume of information significantly impact public support, and that the public engages in careful deliberation before making decisions.