Mobile coverage recently has reached an all-time high, and in most countries, high-speed Internet connections are widely available. Due to technological development, smartphones and tablets have become increasingly popular. Accordingly, we have observed an increasing use of mobile devices to complete web surveys and, hence, survey methodologists have shifted their attention to the challenges that stem from this development. The present study investigated whether the growing use of smartphones has decreased how systematically this choice of device varies between groups of respondents (i.e., how selective smartphone usage for completing web surveys is). We collected a data set of 18,520 respondents from 18 web surveys that were fielded in Germany between 2012 and 2016. Based on these data, we show that while the use of smartphones to complete web surveys has considerably increased over time, selectivity with respect to using this device has remained stable.

In open-list proportional representation systems, choosing candidates based on issue proximity can improve policy congruence. However, in practice, voters may not know enough about individual candidates to do so. Hence, we examine whether voters infer individual positions from cues provided on ballots, namely age and residence. Studying the Swiss parliamentary elections of 2019, we focus on environmental policy, both a very salient issue and featuring considerable intra-party heterogeneity of positions. We combine comprehensive candidate data with a representative voter survey and conduct a survey-embedded experiment (N = 10,758).We find that citizens have indeed little knowledge of candidate positions. However, ballot cues predict policy differences among candidates within parties only to a limited extent, and the experiment does not suggest that voters use ballot information to predict positions directly. Instead, as suggested by additional analyses, citizens may perceive candidates who resemble their own sociodemographic profile as having positions closer to their own. ZusammenfassungIn Verhältniswahlsystemen mit offenen Listen kann die Wahl von KandidatInnen anhand ihrer inhaltlichen Nähe die Politikkongruenz verbessern. In der Praxis wissen WählerInnen jedoch möglicherweise nicht genug überThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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Evermore apparent environmental impacts of vastly increased international trade have been met both by public backlash against further trade liberalization and by efforts at greening international trade. Because public support is essential to environmental and trade policy-making alike, we examine the trade-environment nexus from a public opinion perspective. Our focus lies on whether negative attitudes towards trade are fueled by concern over its environmental consequences. We argue that environmental concern affects how citizens evaluate the costs and benefits of international trade, and that such evaluation is moderated by political ideology. The empirical analysis relies on a population-based survey experiment and a large representative survey in a small open economy, Switzerland. The results show that environmental concern (serenity) leads to decreasing (increasing) appreciation of and support for international trade. Political beliefs (ideology) moderate these effects, resulting in different manifestations of trade skepticism on the political right and left. Another interesting finding given the increasingly salient debate over environmental footprints of consumption and pollution havens is that we do not find evidence for the presumption that citizens care more about environmental damage at home than abroad when forming trade policy preferences. The main policy implication of our findings is that policy-makers should assign high priority to green global supply chains if they wish to sustain public support for liberal international trade policy.

Vastly increased international trade over the past few decades has resulted in an ever larger geographical spread in the environmental impacts of local consumption. Particularly in the case of high-income countries, a large share of their total environmental footprint of local consumption now materializes in places far beyond the respective national border. On the presumption that democratic policy-makers should, and often do, act in line with prevailing public opinion we examine whether currently weak policies addressing consumption-based environmental impacts abroad may reflect a knowledge gap amongst citizens, and how closing this knowledge gap would affect policy preferences concerning the greening of international supply chains. We do so based on an experiment, embedded in a large representative survey (N=8’000) in Switzerland, a high-income country with a very large extraterritorial environmental footprint. The main finding is that there is a major knowledge gap amongst the mass public in this area, and that this gap can be closed. However, closing the knowledge gap does not lead to a significant change in policy preferences in favor of reducing the global environmental footprint of local consumption. This points to major policy challenges in trying to mitigate problems of environmental impact shifting in the global economy.