Despite decades of declining crime rates, longstanding tensions between police and the public continue to frustrate the formation of cooperative relationships necessary for the function of the police and the provision of public safety. In response, policy makers continue to promote community-oriented policing (COP) and its emphasis on positive, nonenforcement contact with the public as an effective strategy for enhancing public trust and police legitimacy. Prior research designs, however, have not leveraged the random assignment of police–public contact to identify the causal effect of such interactions on individual-level attitudes toward the police. Therefore, the question remains: Do positive, nonenforcement interactions with uniformed patrol officers actually cause meaningful improvements in attitudes toward the police? Here, we report on a randomized field experiment conducted in New Haven, CT, that sheds light on this question and identifies the individual-level consequences of positive, nonenforcement contact between police and the public. Findings indicate that a single instance of positive contact with a uniformed police officer can substantially improve public attitudes toward police, including legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. These effects persisted for up to 21 d and were not limited to individuals inclined to trust and cooperate with the police prior to the intervention. This study demonstrates that positive nonenforcement contact can improve public attitudes toward police and suggests that police departments would benefit from an increased focus on strategies that promote positive police–public interactions.

The COVID-19 pandemic imposed new constraints on empirical research, and online data collection by social scientists increased. Generalizing from experiments conducted during this period of persistent crisis may be challenging due to changes in how participants respond to treatments or the composition of online samples. We investigate the generalizability of COVID era survey experiments with 33 replications of 12 pre-pandemic designs, fielded across 13 quota samples of Americans between March and July 2020. We find strong evidence that pre-pandemic experiments replicate in terms of sign and significance, but at somewhat reduced magnitudes. Indirect evidence suggests an increased share of inattentive subjects on online platforms during this period, which may have contributed to smaller estimated treatment effects. Overall, we conclude that the pandemic does not pose a fundamental threat to the generalizability of online experiments to other time periods.

The disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic led many social scientists toward online survey experimentation for empirical research. Generalizing from the experiments conducted during a period of persistent crisis may be challenging due to changes in who participates in online survey research and how the participants respond to treatments. We investigate the generalizability of COVID-era survey experiments with 33 replications of 12 pre-pandemic designs fielded across 13 surveys on American survey respondents obtained from Lucid between March and July of 2020. We find strong evidence that these experiments replicate in terms of sign and significance, but at somewhat reduced magnitudes that are possibly explained by increased inattentiveness. These findings mitigate concerns about the generalizability of online research during this period. The pandemic does not appear to have fundamentally changed how subjects respond to treatments, provided they pay attention to treatments and outcome questions. In this light, we offer some suggestions for renewed care in the design, analysis, and interpretation of experiments conducted during the pandemic.

This paper presents novel survey and experimental evidence that reveals the mass public's interpretation of movements to reform, defund, and abolish the police. We find strong support for police reform, but e↵orts to defund or abolish generate opposition both in terms of slogan and substance. While these di↵erences cannot be explained by di↵ering beliefs about each movement's association with violent protests, racial makeup, or specific programmatic changes, e↵orts to defund and abolish the police appear unpopular because they seek reduced involvement of police in traditional roles and cuts in police numbers. Our findings suggest that public support for changes to American policing is contingent on the perceived implications for crime and public safety. Proposals like defunding and abolition are therefore unlikely to succeed at the national level. Viable police reform may instead require proposals that target changing how police departments and their o cers operate rather than lowering police budgets or decreasing police involvement in responding to crime and calls for service.

Why have decades of high and rising inequality in the United States not increased public support for redistribution? An established theory in political science holds that Americans’ distrust of government decreases their support for redistribution, but empirical support draws primarily on regression analyses of national surveys. I discuss the untestable assumptions required for identification with regression modeling and propose an alternative design that uses randomized experiments about political corruption to identify the effect of trust in government on support for redistribution under weaker assumptions. I apply this to three survey experiments and estimate the effects that large, experimentally induced increases in political trust have on support for redistribution. Contrary to theoretical predictions, estimated effects are substantively negligible, statistically indistinguishable from zero, and comparable to estimates from two placebo experiments. I discuss implications for theory building about causes of support for redistribution in an era of rising inequality and eroding confidence in government.