Scholars often face a choice when designing conjoint experiments: to allow for or to exclude “odd” combinations of attribute levels in the randomized conjoint profiles shown to respondents (such as a profile of a Democratic candidate who does not support abortion rights or an individual who is a medical doctor but does not have a graduate degree). While previous work has studied the statistical and theoretical implications of this decision, there has been little effort to analyze how it impacts the behavior of survey respondents. Utilizing eye-tracking, this study considers how respondents’ attention, information search behavior, and choice patterns respond to odd combinations of attributes included in conjoint profiles. We find that the impact of odd attribute-level combinations is minimal. They do not impact attention, search, or choice behavior substantially or consistently. Our conclusion is that scholars should prioritize other considerations—such as statistical, theoretical, and substantive considerations—when designing conjoint experiments.

Conjoint experiments have enabled scholars to understand the preferences of citizens in a variety of political contexts. We propose a method to modify the standard text-only “box conjoint” to make the treatment higher in external validity with respect to a common target context. Citizens frequently encounter political information encoded as images and in particular in the form of politicians’ social media posts and profiles. We deploy “visual conjoint” experiments where subjects select between two images that encode the same explicit information as is standard in the box conjoint. We conduct an experiment in which we randomize the modality of a conjoint experiment where subjects evaluate the Twitter profiles of hypothetical candidates. We demonstrate that the visual conjoint more effectively encodes image-based information and social endorsement information. The visual conjoint also allows the salience of different attributes to vary naturally the way they do on social media, in contrast to the artificially enforced uniformity of the box conjoint.

The extent in which voters from different ideological viewpoints support state interventions to curb crises remains an outstanding conundrum, marred by conflicting evidence. In this article, we test two possible ways out from such puzzle. The role of ideology to explain support for state interventions, we argue, could be (i) conditional upon the ideological nature of the crisis itself (e.g., whether the crisis relates to conservation vs. post-materialist values), or (ii) unfolding indirectly, by moderating the role played by political trust. We present evidence from a conjoint experiment fielded in 2022 on a representative sample of 1,000 Italian citizens, in which respondents were asked whether they support specific governmental interventions to curb a crisis, described under different conditions (e.g., type of crisis, severity). Our results show that the type of crisis matters marginally – right-wing respondents were more likely to support state interventions only in the case of terrorism. More fundamentally, political trust affects the probability to support state interventions, but only for right-wing citizens.

What are the relative contributions of stereotypes about the race and deservingness of welfare recipients to Americans’ opinions on welfare? A recent study employing a conjoint-experimental method finds that Americans’ stereotypes of welfare recipients as undeserving drive negative attitudes toward welfare, while stereotypes of welfare recipients as Black have little effect. However, this finding may be produced by the measure of welfare attitudes that includes questions implicating deservingness. We implement a conceptual replication of that study using different measures of welfare policy opinions that directly ask respondents about spending, both on welfare generally and on specific welfare programs. We show that when support for welfare is measured using the spending questions, stereotypes about race are significantly associated with opposition to welfare. These results have important implications for the debate on Americans’ opposition to welfare programs, as well as for the measurement of policy opinions in surveys.

Does treatment mode matter in studies of the effects of candidate race or ethnicity on voting decisions? The assumption implicit in most such work is that such treatment mode differences are either small and/or theoretically well understood, so that the choice of how to signal the race of a candidate is largely one of convenience. But this assumption remains untested. Using a nationally representative sample of white voting-age citizens and a modified conjoint design, we evaluate whether signaling candidate ethnicity with ethnic labels and names results in different effects than signaling candidate ethnicity with ethnically identifiable photos and names. Our results provide strong evidence that treatment-mode effects are substantively large and statistically significant. Further, these treatment-mode effects are not consistent with extant theoretical accounts. These results highlight the need for additional theoretical and empirical work on race/ethnicity treatment-mode effects.