SURVEY EXPERIMENTS

Acceptance of austerity policies: Evidence from a survey experiment

What drives people to accept or resist austerity? This paper examines the way framing provided by populist leaders can activate certain political attitudes towards austerity. Accepting that the key mechanism in populist framing is the ability to attribute blame to other agents, we argue that populism is about the redistribution of anger (Pappas 2014). Therefore our main research question is: Does the framing of austerity policies affect the way those policies are perceived by the general public? We employ a vignette social experiment where stories represent real situations (leaders’ official statements on austerity in Greece) to elicit voters’ preferences and judgments.

Interested to learn more about our research on austerity politics? You may listen, my co-author, Theofanis Exadaktylos, presenting our research at the University of Birmingham here.

Economic voting and unemployment: Evidence from a survey experiment

The state of the economy has been traditionally considered as an important determinant of political behaviour. The theory of economic voting suggests that voters will support the party in government when the economy is good but will vote against the incumbent when the economy is deteriorating. In a context of a severe economic crisis, we examine how fluctuations at the level of unemployment affect the vote for the party in government. We do so by using a survey experiment were we manipulate the level of unemployment.

LAB EXPERIMENTS

Political Attitudes and the Breakdown of Cooperation: Evidence from a Public-Good game

This paper presents a public good game that can be used to introduce players to the conflict between social incentives to provide to the public good and constraints from individual incentives and political attitudes.