Public Opinion

Research in political science suggests campaigns have a minimal effect on voters’ attitudes and vote choice. We evaluate the effectiveness of the 2016 Trump and Clinton campaigns at informing voters by giving respondents an opportunity to name policy positions of candidates that they felt would make them better off. The relatively high rates of respondents’ ability to name a Trump policy that would make them better off suggests that the success of his campaign can be partly attributed to its ability to communicate memorable information. Our evidence also suggests that cable television informed voters: respondents exposed to higher levels of liberal news were more likely to be able to name Clinton policies, and voters exposed to higher levels of conservative news were more likely to name Trump policies; these effects hold even conditioning on respondents’ ideology and exposure to mainstream media. Our results demonstrate the advantages of using novel survey questions and provide additional insights into the 2016 campaign that challenge one part of the conventional narrative about the presumed non-importance of operational ideology.

Online panels have become an important resource for research in political science, but the financial compensation involved incentivizes respondents to become “survey professionals”, which raises concerns about data quality. We provide evidence on survey professionalism using behavioral web browsing data from three U.S. samples, recruited via Lucid, YouGov, and Facebook (total n = 3,886). Survey professionalism is common but varies across samples: By our most conservative measure, we identify 1.7% of respondents on Facebook, 7.9% of respondents on YouGov, and 34.3% of respondents on Lucid as survey professionals. However, evidence that professionals lower data quality is limited: they do not systematically differ demographically or politically from non-professionals and do not respond more randomly—although they are somewhat more likely to speed, to straightline, and to take questionnaires repeatedly. While concerns are warranted, we conclude that survey professionals do not, by and large, distort inferences of research based on online panels.