The health and economic outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic will in part be determined by how effectively experts can communicate information to the public and the degree to which people follow expert recommendation. Using a survey experiment conducted in May of 2020 with almost 5,000 respondents, this paper examines the effect of source cues and message frames on perceptions of information credibility in the context of COVID-19. Each health recommendation was framed by expert or non-expert sources, was fact- or experience-based, and suggested potential gain or loss to test if either the source cue or framing of issues affected responses to the pandemic. We find no evidence that either source cue or message framing influence people’s responses—instead, respondents’ ideological predispositions, media consumption, and age explain much of the variation in survey responses, suggesting that public health messaging may face challenges from growing ideological cleavages in American politics.

In 2017, the Taiwanese Constitutional Court handed down Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748, which was a ruling in favour of same-sex marriage. The Court also ordered the national legislature to amend the law within two years. Despite a significant backslide in the Taiwanese 2018 referendum, the legislature eventually followed the Court’s order and legalized gay marriage in 2019. This victory made Taiwan the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in Asia. Many legal scholars consider the same-sex marriage ruling a progressive decision in which the Court undertook a counter-majoritarian task of protecting a minority group. While we agree with the Court’s role in promoting marriage equality, we contend that most legal scholars overlook an important question in this dynamic: the legislature had had several chances to settle this issue over the past decades, so why did it refuse to draft gay-marriage legislation but later, in 2019, defer to the Court’s decision? In this paper, we explain the political foundations of an activist judiciary by using the case of the first gay-marriage legislation in Asia. We argue that the risk of position-taking on tough issues leads incentive-facing political elites to engage in position avoidance and to see the political value in deferring to a high court’s ruling. Using original data, we present evidence of how Taiwan’s diverse constituency relative to the same-sex marriage issue influenced legislators’ position-avoidance behaviour and led them to dodge political backfire by delegating policy-making authority to the Constitutional Court.

Do U.S. voters care about the policy positions of a candidate when choosing prosecutors? Conventional wisdom suggests the public favors punitiveness and that prosecutorial elections are apolitical. I argue that voters do care about the policy positions of prosecutors, but different information environments induce different voting behaviors. Using a conjoint experiment across four information settings, I show how policy congruence plays an important role in shaping voter’s decisions when candidates’ policy information is available. When policy information is sparse, voters take cues to infer candidates’ political leanings even in nonpartisan or low-information electoral environments. Contrary to the dominant view that the public favors punitiveness, my results suggest that the public is not unequivocally harsh. These findings speak to the possible benefits that society can reap from increasing the level of information available in prosecutorial elections. The findings also call into question the prevalent view that elections ought to compel prosecutors to adopt tough-on-crime stances that result in a highly incarcerated populace.