Crisis perceptions and economic voting among the rich and the poor: the United Kingdom and Germany

This chapter leverages extensive survey data collected during the 2008-2010 period in order to understand whether individuals, from different economic circumstances and who might have been differentially affected by the Recession, respond similarly or differently to these economic shocks. The chapter describes how rich and poor voters responded to the economic crisis of 2008–2010 drawing on data from two panel studies conducted during the 2009 German Federal election and the 2010 U.K. Parliamentary election

How to detect heterogeneity in conjoint experiments

Conjoint experiments are fast becoming one of the dominant experimental methods within the social sciences. Despite recent efforts to model heterogeneity within this type of experiment, the relationship between the conjoint design and lower-level causal estimands is underdeveloped. In this paper, we clarify how conjoint heterogeneity can be construed as a set of nested, causal parameters that correspond to the levels of the conjoint design. We then use this framework to propose a new estimation strategy, using machine learning, that better allows researchers to evaluate treatment effect heterogeneity. We also provide novel tools for classifying and analysing heterogeneity post-estimation using partitioning algorithms. Replicating two conjoint experiments, we demonstrate our theoretical argument, and show how this method helps estimate and detect substantive patterns of heterogeneity. To accompany this paper, we provide new a R package, cjbart, that allows researchers to model heterogeneity in their experimental conjoint data

Nudgen für die Rentenentscheidung im Vereinigten Königreich – Implikationen für die Privatisierung der Rentenpolitik

Over the last decades, politics in the UK has shifted away its focus from government-managed pensions to privatized pension solutions and services. In turn, ?nancial literacy has become a critical issue for consumers, politicians and regulation agencies. The precise experimental examination of website regulation used to compare investment and pension products, as well as the design and presentation of product information through nudging become new ?elds of activity for regulatory agencies. We have undertaken a number of experimental projects on consumer decision making on pension product markets for U.K. authorities. These experiments used informational nudges. A key finding that we have gained from these studies is that personalized nudges tailored to individual demographic factors effectively encourage comparison of pension products. However, we were not able to determine a clear influence on the pension decision by the individual financial literacy

Replication data for: Do Surveys Provide Representative or Whimsical Assessments of the Economy

We argue that survey responses to economic evaluation questions exhibit instability and can be affected by fairly trivial changes in questionnaire wording. Our analyses make three empirical contributions to this area of survey research. First, we demonstrate that within the course of the interview there is considerable instability in economic evaluations. Second, one source of this instability is cues regarding economic performance, such as those provided by the media. We find that respondents can be persuaded to change their economic evaluations if they receive contradictory cues. Finally, we demonstrate that question placement can affect economic evaluations. More specifically, we demonstrate that proximity to political questions can contaminate economic evaluations. If economic evaluations closely follow political preference questions, respondents have a tendency to give economic responses that are “consistent” with their political responses. Our empirical analysis is based on economic evaluations of respondents to the Hungarian Markets and Democracy Survey administered during December 1997

Political Analysis, 9:1 Do Surveys Provide Representative or Whimsical Assessments of the Economy?

We argue that survey responses to economic evaluation questions exhibit instability and can be affected by fairly trivial changes in questionnaire wording. Our analyses make three empirical contributions to this area of survey research. First, we demonstrate that within the course of the interview there is considerable instability in economic evaluations. Second, one source of this instability is cues regarding economic performance, such as those provided by the media. We find that respondents can be persuaded to change their economic evaluations if they receive contradictory cues. Finally, we demonstrate that question placement can affect economic evaluations. More specifically, we demonstrate that proximity to political questions can contaminate economic evaluations. If economic evaluations closely follow political preference questions, respondents have a tendency to give economic responses that are “consistent ” with their political responses. Our empirical analysis is based on economic evaluations of respondents to the Hungarian Markets and Democracy Survey administered during December 1997.