Suchergebnisse

Although there is a large literature on the predictive accuracy of pre-election polls, there is virtually no systematic research examining the role that a candidate's gender plays in polling accuracy. This is a surprising omission given the precipitous growth of female candidates in recent years. Looking at Senate and Gubernatorial candidates from 1989 to 2008 (more than 200 elections in over 40 states), we analyze the accuracy of pre-election polls for almost the complete universe of female candidates and a matched sample of white male cases. We demonstrate that pre-election polls consistently underestimate support for female candidates when compared to white male candidates. Furthermore, our results indicate that this phenomenon-which we dub the Richards Effect, after Ann Richards of Texas-is more common in states which exhibit traits associated with culturally conservative views of gender issues. Adapted from the source document.

International climate negotiations occur against the backdrop of increasing collective risk: the likelihood of catastrophic economic loss due to climate change will continue to increase unless and until global mitigation efforts are sufficient to prevent it. We introduce a novel alternating-offers bargaining model that incorporates this characteristic feature of climate change. We test the model using an incentivized experiment. We manipulate two important distributional equity principles: capacity to pay for mitigation of climate change and vulnerability to its potentially catastrophic effects. Our results show that less vulnerable parties do not exploit the greater vulnerability of their bargaining partners. They are, rather, more generous. Conversely, parties with greater capacity are less generous in their offers. Both collective risk itself and its importance in light of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report make it all the more urgent to better understand this crucial strategic feature of climate change bargaining.

Since the Republican and Democratic conventions in July, Hillary Clinton has experienced a poll 'bounce', to lead Donald Trump by about 8 percent, especially in telephone polls with live interviewers. Internet polls, by contrast, tend to show Clinton leading by only 2 or 3 percent. Are these internet polls underestimating Clinton or overestimating Trump? Using results from the 2016 presidential primaries to assess state polls' accuracy, Taylor Howell, Christopher Stout and Reuben Kline find that that internet polls were slightly more likely to overestimate support for Trump than live interviewer polls, and that they were likely to underestimate support for Clinton by nearly 2 percent. They suggest that online polls may still have some ways to come in terms of accuracy and may be skewing away from Clinton by offering a "don't know" option to those who are as yet unwilling to commit to voting for her.

Empirical evidence suggests that non-participation underlies a variety of social dilemmas. In collective risk social dilemmas (CRSD), non-participation is viewed as strategic defection—a selfish behavior that increases individual utility at the cost of the group. We conducted a hybrid laboratory-then-online experiment to examine if non-participation in a CRSD may be fundamentally different from the act of strategic defection. We confirmed that non-participation is a problem in a social dilemma. When participation is required, a randomly formed group of subjects was virtually certain to reach the loss prevention threshold (0.999 probability). On the other hand, when an empirically realistic non-participation option was introduced, the probability of reaching the goal by a randomly formed group decreased to 0.599. We also found evidence that the profile of a typical non-participant does not fit the profile of a strategic defector. Non-participants in the experiment were highly cooperative when they had to make a contribution decision. Non-participants in the experiment did not try to increase their payoffs, including in the treatment condition when non-participation led to a default contribution of 100% of the subject's endowment.

We investigate the norm of just deserts and its effect on honesty. Just deserts is an essential norm in a market society, and honesty is an important factor in economic and social exchange. In particular, we analyze what happens when the social distributive rules betray the reasonable expectation that who deserves more will obtain a larger payoff. Using a formal-theoretic framework—equity theory—we explore the nexus between the perception of just deserts and honesty, combining cross-national survey (WVS) evidence and data from two laboratory experiments—conducted in the United States and Italy—to study whether violations of the principle of just deserts contribute to an increased tolerance for or an engagement in dishonest and corrupt acts. We find convergent evidence that violation of the just deserts norm results in a greater propensity toward self-serving dishonesty, and that this effect is distinct from the effect of inequality. Both the survey and experimental results also indicate that sensitivity to violations of the just deserts norm vary cross-nationally. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our results for theories of distributive justice and multiple equilibria in societal levels of honesty.

AbstractDo people judge some forms of wage discrimination to be more unfair than others? We report an experiment in an online labor market in which participants were paid based on discriminatory rules. We test hypotheses about fairness based on procedural justice, divisiveness, and affective polarization between partisans. Workers transcribed text and then learned that they earned more or less money than other workers for doing the same job. We manipulated whether the unequal pay was based on their political party, eye color, or an arbitrary choice between two doors. Consistent with the divisiveness hypothesis, participants judged discriminatory pay to be less fair when it was based on a stable characteristic, political party, or eye color, compared to a transient choice (between doors). We find mixed evidence about how affective polarization exacerbates the unfairness of partisan discrimination. We discuss implications for the procedural justice of wage discrimination.

We investigate the effect of personality on prosocial behavior in a Bayesian multilevel meta-analysis (MLMA) of 15 published, interdisciplinary experimental studies. With data from the 15 studies constituting nearly 2500 individual observations, we find that the Big Five traits of Agreeableness and Openness are significantly and positively associated with prosocial behavior, while none of the other three traits are. These results are robust to a number of different model specifications and operationalizations of prosociality, and they greatly clarify the contradictory findings in the literature on the relationship between personality and prosocial behavior. Though previous research has indicated that incentivized experiments result in reduced prosocial behavior, we find no evidence that monetary incentivization of participants affects prosocial tendencies. By leveraging individual observations from multiple studies and explicitly modeling the multilevel structure of the data, MLMA permits the simultaneous estimation of study- and individual-level effects. The Bayesian approach allows us to estimate study-level effects in an unbiased and efficient manner, even with a relatively small number of studies. We conclude by discussing the limitations of our study and the advantages and disadvantages of the MLMA method.