As Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has surged in popularity throughout political science, scholars have increasingly challenged the external validity of inferences made drawing upon MTurk samples. At workshops and conferences experimental and survey-based researchers hear questions about the demographic characteristics, political preferences, occupation, and geographic location of MTurk respondents. In this paper we answer these questions and present a number of novel results. By introducing a new benchmark comparison for MTurk surveys, the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, we compare the joint distributions of age, gender, and race among MTurk respondents within the United States. In addition, we compare political, occupational, and geographical information about respondents from MTurk and CCES. Throughout the paper we show several ways that political scientists can use the strengths of MTurk to attract respondents with specific characteristics of interest to best answer their substantive research questions.

(Hattem 2015). His assessment was condemned from across the political spectrum, from critics on both the left (including then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton) and right (including then GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum). Similar public debates erupted following other violent incidents, including the bombing at the Boston Marathon and shooting in Orlando, Florida. These debates highlight not only the contentiousness of classifying terrorism, but also the stakes involved in doing so, for policy makers, academics, and members of the public alike. In this article, we turn to experimental methods to explain the tenor of these public debates. We investigate terrorism in a public opinion context not because we believe that the mass public's intuitions can necessarily resolve normative debates about what should or should not be considered terrorism, but rather because of the central role that public opinion plays in our understanding of how terrorism works. In a vast array of prior research, terrorism is understood as a form of violence that functions by attracting public attention. It is because terrorism hinges on public reaction that Margaret Thatcher suggested terrorists depend on "the oxygen of publicity," that Carlo Pisacane declared terrorism to be "propaganda by deed," and that Ayman al-Zawahiri suggested that for al-Qaeda, media coverage is "more than half" the battle (Smith and Walsh 2013, 312). If the responses of ordinary citizens constitute a central causal mechanism through which terrorism operates, it logically follows that understanding what ordinary citizens think terrorism is is a crucial prerequisite to understanding how they react to it.

In this article, we use an experimental survey design to explore how the tactical choices of social movements affect public opinion about whether the government should negotiate with the movement and the bargains that should be struck once negotiations begin. In doing so, we test competing theories about how we should expect the use of tactics with varying degrees of extremeness—including demonstrations, occupations, and bombings—to influence public opinion. We find that respondents are less likely to think the government should negotiate with organizations that use the tactic of bombing when compared with demonstrations or occupations. However, depending on the outcome variable and baseline category used in the analysis, we find mixed support for whether respondents think organizations that use bombings should receive less once negotiations begin. The results of this article are generally consistent with the theoretical and policy-based arguments centering around how governments should not negotiate with organizations that engage in violent activity commonly associated with terrorist organizations.

Prior research demonstrates that responses to surveys can vary depending on the race, gender, or ethnicity of the investigator asking the question. We build upon this research by empirically testing how information about researcher identity in online surveys affects subject responses. We do so by conducting an experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in which we vary the name of the researcher in the advertisement for the experiment and on the informed consent page in order to cue different racial and gender identities. We fail to reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference in how respondents answer questions when assigned to a putatively black/white or male/female researcher.

How did personal wealth and slaveownership affect the likelihood Southerners fought for the Confederate Army in the American Civil War? On the one hand, wealthy Southerners had incentives to free-ride on poorer Southerners and avoid fighting; on the other hand, wealthy Southerners were disproportionately slaveowners, and thus had more at stake in the outcome of the war. We assemble a dataset on roughly 3.9 million free citizens in the Confederacy and show that slaveowners were more likely to fight than non-slaveowners. We then exploit a randomized land lottery held in 1832 in Georgia. Households of lottery winners owned more slaves in 1850 and were more likely to have sons who fought in the Confederate Army. We conclude that slaveownership, in contrast to some other kinds of wealth, compelled Southerners to fight despite free-rider incentives because it raised their stakes in the war’s outcome.