Matthew H Graham
Biographic Data
| ID | 1147257 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew H Graham |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew H |
| FAMILY NAME | Graham |
| SIGNATURE | GRAHAM M H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Temple College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4808-2984 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 608 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Partisan Expressive Responding
Research on partisan expressive responding suggests that the beliefs people express in surveys are more partisan than their underlying perceptions. This article examines the scope and importance of expressive responding through a meta-reanalysis of 44 studies from 25 articles. On average, treatments designed to reduce expressive responding shrink measured partisan bias by about 25%. Across the 242 survey questions in the data, treatments increase…
Expressive Responding and the Economy
The partisan gap in economic perceptions flipped unusually dramatically after the 2024 U.S. presidential election: following the Republican victory, Democrats (Republicans) suddenly rated the economy much more negatively (positively). Was the resulting partisan difference a case of expressive responding, wherein surveys exaggerate partisan bias in measures of economic perceptions? In April 2025, I fielded a panel survey experiment that asked surv…
Catch Questions Can Increase Lookups on Political Knowledge Questions
Surveys commonly use “catch” or “trap” questions to identify subjects who are likely to look up the answers to knowledge questions. This note shows that catch questions can backfire, causing an increase in the proportion of respondents who look up the answers to subsequent questions. In two preregistered survey experiments in online convenience samples, a catch question was randomly assigned to appear before or after a knowledge battery. When the…
Less Partisan but No More Competent
Research suggests that partisanship interferes with people’s ability to distinguish between factually verifiable statements and opinion statements. We investigate the degree to which observed partisan bias in fact-opinion discernment is due to expressive responding: partisans may claim that congenial opinions are facts, and that uncongenial facts are opinions, because they want to express their partisan attitude toward the statement. Four experim…
Increasing Demand for Fact-Checking
Did Trump’s Indictments Rally His Base? Evidence from the Counterfactual Format
In the task of assessing how sudden, significant events causally affect public opinion, political pollsters often ask respondents how the event affected their attitudes and beliefs. We study the case of former President Donald Trump’s federal indictment for allegedly mishandling classified documents using two methods of retrospective causal inference. The commonly used change format asks respondents to state directly how the event affected their …
Misleading Polls in the Media
In today’s competitive information environment, clicks are the currency of the digital media landscape. Clickbait journalism attempts to entice attention with provocative and sensational headlines, but what are the implications when public opinion polls are the hook? Does the use of survey clickbait—news stories that make misleading claims about public opinion—have implications for perceptions of the public, journalists, or the polling industry? …
Expressive Responding and Belief in 2020 Election Fraud
Detecting and Deterring Information Search in Online Surveys
This article introduces a framework for evaluating methods of combatting information search in online surveys. Three empirical studies based on the framework suggest that search is a serious but manageable problem. Search frequency varies substantially according to question content, ranging from 2% to 30% in batteries of general political knowledge questions. Deterrence works: a pledge not to cheat reduces search by half. Detection also works: we…
An Outbreak of Selective Attribution
Crises and disasters give voters an opportunity to observe the incumbent's response and reward or punish them for successes and failures. Yet, even when voters perceive events similarly, they tend to attribute responsibility selectively, disproportionately crediting their party for positive developments and blaming opponents for negative developments. We examine selective attribution during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, reporting th…
Combating Hateful Attitudes and Online Browsing Behavior
This study adds to the analogic perspective-taking literature by examining whether an online perspective-taking intervention affects both antisemitic attitudes and behaviors – in particular, engagement with antisemitic websites. Subjects who were randomly assigned to the treatment viewed a 90-s video of a college student describing an experience with antisemitism and reflected on its similarity to their own experiences. In a survey, treated subje…
Irrelevant Events and Voting Behavior
How well do voters hold politicians accountable? Although a long-standing research tradition claims that elections are effective tools for the sanctioning and selection of leaders, a more recent literature argues that voters often reward and punish incumbents for "irrelevant events." The empirical literature on this topic is characterized by conflicting findings. Drawing on ideas from the open science movement, and showing how they can advance th…
Public Opinion and Nuclear Use
Does the public oppose nuclear use? Survey experimental research varying either the advantages or the disadvantages of nuclear use has produced a wide range of results. Yet no study has examined how the military advantages and strategic and moral disadvantages of nuclear weapons interact. We explore this interaction and uncover a pattern that unifies the literature's seemingly disparate results: the persuasive power of nuclear weapons' military a…
Measuring Misperceptions
Survey data are commonly cited as evidence of widespread misperceptions and misinformed beliefs. This paper shows that surveys generally fail to identify the firm, deep, steadfast, confidently held beliefs described in leading accounts. Instead, even those who report 100% certain belief in falsehoods about well-studied topics like climate change, vaccine side effects, and the COVID-19 death toll exhibit substantial response instability over time.…
How Should We Think about Replicating Observational Studies? A Reply to Fowler and Montagnes
In their reply to our article, "Irrelevant Events and Voting Behavior," Fowler and Montagnes reanalyze our replication study of college football's effect on election outcomes. Although we agree with Fowler and Montagnes that the evidence supporting the irrelevant events hypothesis is weaker than earlier research suggested, they overstate this case. Philosophically, we disagree with Fowler and Montagnes's preference for (1) running a plethora of t…
We Don’t Know” Means “They’re Not Sure
The most familiar approach to handling respondent uncertainty about survey questions, the “don’t know” (DK) response, has an inconvenient feature: it records no direct information about respondents’ confidence in their answers. This article shows that DK responses contain more information than meets the eye. Using 161 survey questions from 11 surveys conducted between 1993 and 2019, the analysis demonstrates that the percentage of respondents say…
Asking About Attitude Change
Surveys often ask respondents how information or events changed their attitudes. Does [information X] make you more or less supportive of [policy Y]? Does [scandal X] make you more or less likely to vote for [politician Y]? We show that this type of question (the change format) exhibits poor measurement properties, in large part because subjects engage in response substitution. When asked how their attitudes changed, people often report the level…
What would delegates do? When and how the delegate paradox affects estimates of ideological congruence
Self-Awareness of Political Knowledge
Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States
Is support for democracy in the United States robust enough to deter undemocratic behavior by elected politicians? We develop a model of the public as a democratic check and evaluate it using two empirical strategies: an original, nationally representative candidate-choice experiment in which some politicians take positions that violate key democratic principles, and a natural experiment that occurred during Montana's 2017 special election for th…
How Economic Integration Affects Party Issue Emphases
The economic dimension has typically been considered the primary dimension of political party competition. However, parties often rally voters on the basis of non-economic issues. In this article, we argue that integration into global markets and into the European Union (EU) constrains parties’ abilities to credibly differentiate themselves on economic issues. Given these constraints, and voters’ awareness of them, parties activate other non-econ…
Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States
Is support for democracy in the United States robust enough to deter undemocratic behavior by elected politicians? We develop a model of the public as a democratic check and evaluate it using two empirical strategies: an original, nationally representative candidate-choice experiment in which some politicians take positions that violate key democratic principles, and a natural experiment that occurred during Montana's 2017 special election for th…
How Economic Integration Affects Party Issue Emphases
The economic dimension has typically been considered the primary dimension of political party competition. However, parties often rally voters on the basis of non-economic issues. In this article, we argue that integration into global markets and into the European Union (EU) constrains parties’ abilities to credibly differentiate themselves on economic issues. Given these constraints, and voters’ awareness of them, parties activate other non-econ…
Self-Awareness of Political Knowledge
Measuring Misperceptions
Survey data are commonly cited as evidence of widespread misperceptions and misinformed beliefs. This paper shows that surveys generally fail to identify the firm, deep, steadfast, confidently held beliefs described in leading accounts. Instead, even those who report 100% certain belief in falsehoods about well-studied topics like climate change, vaccine side effects, and the COVID-19 death toll exhibit substantial response instability over time.…
An Outbreak of Selective Attribution
Crises and disasters give voters an opportunity to observe the incumbent's response and reward or punish them for successes and failures. Yet, even when voters perceive events similarly, they tend to attribute responsibility selectively, disproportionately crediting their party for positive developments and blaming opponents for negative developments. We examine selective attribution during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, reporting th…
Asking About Attitude Change
Surveys often ask respondents how information or events changed their attitudes. Does [information X] make you more or less supportive of [policy Y]? Does [scandal X] make you more or less likely to vote for [politician Y]? We show that this type of question (the change format) exhibits poor measurement properties, in large part because subjects engage in response substitution. When asked how their attitudes changed, people often report the level…
Public Opinion and Nuclear Use
Does the public oppose nuclear use? Survey experimental research varying either the advantages or the disadvantages of nuclear use has produced a wide range of results. Yet no study has examined how the military advantages and strategic and moral disadvantages of nuclear weapons interact. We explore this interaction and uncover a pattern that unifies the literature's seemingly disparate results: the persuasive power of nuclear weapons' military a…
Expressive Responding and Belief in 2020 Election Fraud
Detecting and Deterring Information Search in Online Surveys
This article introduces a framework for evaluating methods of combatting information search in online surveys. Three empirical studies based on the framework suggest that search is a serious but manageable problem. Search frequency varies substantially according to question content, ranging from 2% to 30% in batteries of general political knowledge questions. Deterrence works: a pledge not to cheat reduces search by half. Detection also works: we…
Irrelevant Events and Voting Behavior
How well do voters hold politicians accountable? Although a long-standing research tradition claims that elections are effective tools for the sanctioning and selection of leaders, a more recent literature argues that voters often reward and punish incumbents for "irrelevant events." The empirical literature on this topic is characterized by conflicting findings. Drawing on ideas from the open science movement, and showing how they can advance th…
We Don’t Know” Means “They’re Not Sure
The most familiar approach to handling respondent uncertainty about survey questions, the “don’t know” (DK) response, has an inconvenient feature: it records no direct information about respondents’ confidence in their answers. This article shows that DK responses contain more information than meets the eye. Using 161 survey questions from 11 surveys conducted between 1993 and 2019, the analysis demonstrates that the percentage of respondents say…
Less Partisan but No More Competent
Research suggests that partisanship interferes with people’s ability to distinguish between factually verifiable statements and opinion statements. We investigate the degree to which observed partisan bias in fact-opinion discernment is due to expressive responding: partisans may claim that congenial opinions are facts, and that uncongenial facts are opinions, because they want to express their partisan attitude toward the statement. Four experim…
How Should We Think about Replicating Observational Studies? A Reply to Fowler and Montagnes
In their reply to our article, "Irrelevant Events and Voting Behavior," Fowler and Montagnes reanalyze our replication study of college football's effect on election outcomes. Although we agree with Fowler and Montagnes that the evidence supporting the irrelevant events hypothesis is weaker than earlier research suggested, they overstate this case. Philosophically, we disagree with Fowler and Montagnes's preference for (1) running a plethora of t…
Misleading Polls in the Media
In today’s competitive information environment, clicks are the currency of the digital media landscape. Clickbait journalism attempts to entice attention with provocative and sensational headlines, but what are the implications when public opinion polls are the hook? Does the use of survey clickbait—news stories that make misleading claims about public opinion—have implications for perceptions of the public, journalists, or the polling industry? …
Expressive Responding and the Economy
The partisan gap in economic perceptions flipped unusually dramatically after the 2024 U.S. presidential election: following the Republican victory, Democrats (Republicans) suddenly rated the economy much more negatively (positively). Was the resulting partisan difference a case of expressive responding, wherein surveys exaggerate partisan bias in measures of economic perceptions? In April 2025, I fielded a panel survey experiment that asked surv…
Catch Questions Can Increase Lookups on Political Knowledge Questions
Surveys commonly use “catch” or “trap” questions to identify subjects who are likely to look up the answers to knowledge questions. This note shows that catch questions can backfire, causing an increase in the proportion of respondents who look up the answers to subsequent questions. In two preregistered survey experiments in online convenience samples, a catch question was randomly assigned to appear before or after a knowledge battery. When the…
Increasing Demand for Fact-Checking
How Economic Integration Affects Party Issue Emphases
The economic dimension has typically been considered the primary dimension of political party competition. However, parties often rally voters on the basis of non-economic issues. In this article, we argue that integration into global markets and into the European Union (EU) constrains parties’ abilities to credibly differentiate themselves on economic issues. Given these constraints, and voters’ awareness of them, parties activate other non-econ…
What would delegates do? When and how the delegate paradox affects estimates of ideological congruence
Self-Awareness of Political Knowledge
Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States
Is support for democracy in the United States robust enough to deter undemocratic behavior by elected politicians? We develop a model of the public as a democratic check and evaluate it using two empirical strategies: an original, nationally representative candidate-choice experiment in which some politicians take positions that violate key democratic principles, and a natural experiment that occurred during Montana's 2017 special election for th…
We Don’t Know” Means “They’re Not Sure
The most familiar approach to handling respondent uncertainty about survey questions, the “don’t know” (DK) response, has an inconvenient feature: it records no direct information about respondents’ confidence in their answers. This article shows that DK responses contain more information than meets the eye. Using 161 survey questions from 11 surveys conducted between 1993 and 2019, the analysis demonstrates that the percentage of respondents say…
Asking About Attitude Change
Surveys often ask respondents how information or events changed their attitudes. Does [information X] make you more or less supportive of [policy Y]? Does [scandal X] make you more or less likely to vote for [politician Y]? We show that this type of question (the change format) exhibits poor measurement properties, in large part because subjects engage in response substitution. When asked how their attitudes changed, people often report the level…
How Should We Think about Replicating Observational Studies? A Reply to Fowler and Montagnes
In their reply to our article, "Irrelevant Events and Voting Behavior," Fowler and Montagnes reanalyze our replication study of college football's effect on election outcomes. Although we agree with Fowler and Montagnes that the evidence supporting the irrelevant events hypothesis is weaker than earlier research suggested, they overstate this case. Philosophically, we disagree with Fowler and Montagnes's preference for (1) running a plethora of t…
Combating Hateful Attitudes and Online Browsing Behavior
This study adds to the analogic perspective-taking literature by examining whether an online perspective-taking intervention affects both antisemitic attitudes and behaviors – in particular, engagement with antisemitic websites. Subjects who were randomly assigned to the treatment viewed a 90-s video of a college student describing an experience with antisemitism and reflected on its similarity to their own experiences. In a survey, treated subje…
Irrelevant Events and Voting Behavior
How well do voters hold politicians accountable? Although a long-standing research tradition claims that elections are effective tools for the sanctioning and selection of leaders, a more recent literature argues that voters often reward and punish incumbents for "irrelevant events." The empirical literature on this topic is characterized by conflicting findings. Drawing on ideas from the open science movement, and showing how they can advance th…
Public Opinion and Nuclear Use
Does the public oppose nuclear use? Survey experimental research varying either the advantages or the disadvantages of nuclear use has produced a wide range of results. Yet no study has examined how the military advantages and strategic and moral disadvantages of nuclear weapons interact. We explore this interaction and uncover a pattern that unifies the literature's seemingly disparate results: the persuasive power of nuclear weapons' military a…
Measuring Misperceptions
Survey data are commonly cited as evidence of widespread misperceptions and misinformed beliefs. This paper shows that surveys generally fail to identify the firm, deep, steadfast, confidently held beliefs described in leading accounts. Instead, even those who report 100% certain belief in falsehoods about well-studied topics like climate change, vaccine side effects, and the COVID-19 death toll exhibit substantial response instability over time.…
Increasing Demand for Fact-Checking
Did Trump’s Indictments Rally His Base? Evidence from the Counterfactual Format
In the task of assessing how sudden, significant events causally affect public opinion, political pollsters often ask respondents how the event affected their attitudes and beliefs. We study the case of former President Donald Trump’s federal indictment for allegedly mishandling classified documents using two methods of retrospective causal inference. The commonly used change format asks respondents to state directly how the event affected their …
Misleading Polls in the Media
In today’s competitive information environment, clicks are the currency of the digital media landscape. Clickbait journalism attempts to entice attention with provocative and sensational headlines, but what are the implications when public opinion polls are the hook? Does the use of survey clickbait—news stories that make misleading claims about public opinion—have implications for perceptions of the public, journalists, or the polling industry? …
Expressive Responding and Belief in 2020 Election Fraud
Detecting and Deterring Information Search in Online Surveys
This article introduces a framework for evaluating methods of combatting information search in online surveys. Three empirical studies based on the framework suggest that search is a serious but manageable problem. Search frequency varies substantially according to question content, ranging from 2% to 30% in batteries of general political knowledge questions. Deterrence works: a pledge not to cheat reduces search by half. Detection also works: we…
An Outbreak of Selective Attribution
Crises and disasters give voters an opportunity to observe the incumbent's response and reward or punish them for successes and failures. Yet, even when voters perceive events similarly, they tend to attribute responsibility selectively, disproportionately crediting their party for positive developments and blaming opponents for negative developments. We examine selective attribution during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, reporting th…
Expressive Responding and the Economy
The partisan gap in economic perceptions flipped unusually dramatically after the 2024 U.S. presidential election: following the Republican victory, Democrats (Republicans) suddenly rated the economy much more negatively (positively). Was the resulting partisan difference a case of expressive responding, wherein surveys exaggerate partisan bias in measures of economic perceptions? In April 2025, I fielded a panel survey experiment that asked surv…
Catch Questions Can Increase Lookups on Political Knowledge Questions
Surveys commonly use “catch” or “trap” questions to identify subjects who are likely to look up the answers to knowledge questions. This note shows that catch questions can backfire, causing an increase in the proportion of respondents who look up the answers to subsequent questions. In two preregistered survey experiments in online convenience samples, a catch question was randomly assigned to appear before or after a knowledge battery. When the…
Less Partisan but No More Competent
Research suggests that partisanship interferes with people’s ability to distinguish between factually verifiable statements and opinion statements. We investigate the degree to which observed partisan bias in fact-opinion discernment is due to expressive responding: partisans may claim that congenial opinions are facts, and that uncongenial facts are opinions, because they want to express their partisan attitude toward the statement. Four experim…
Partisan Expressive Responding
Research on partisan expressive responding suggests that the beliefs people express in surveys are more partisan than their underlying perceptions. This article examines the scope and importance of expressive responding through a meta-reanalysis of 44 studies from 25 articles. On average, treatments designed to reduce expressive responding shrink measured partisan bias by about 25%. Across the 242 survey questions in the data, treatments increase…
Political science (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (6 works)