Strengthening Democracy Challenge
How
do I participate?
Thank you for your interest in submitting your intervention. This section will walk you through the nuts and bolts of how to submit your idea, as well as the detailed rules for how we measure and evaluate your idea. If you are ready to submit, please proceed to our Submit Page. If you would like to download a template of the submission questionnaire, please click here.
How
will we measure and evaluate?
To identify the best interventions, we will be conducting a large survey experiment. The survey experiment involves recruiting a representative sample of up to 30,000 US adults (~15,000 Democrats and ~15,000 Republicans) from an online panel, then randomly assigning them to participate in one of the interventions or a control condition. We will filter our sample based on attention checks, so you can expect participants to be relatively attentive to intervention materials. The behavior and attitudes of people in the control group are like a baseline, enabling us to know what American partisans do and think in the absence of the interventions you submit. We will identify the extent to which exposure to the interventions makes a difference relative to the control group.
What kinds of behaviors and attitudes are we using to measure the effect of interventions? In the experiment, we will examine three primary outcomes: anti-democratic attitudes, support for partisan violence, and partisan animosity. For details on how we collect these outcomes, please download our handbook.
Primary outcomes
Anti-Democratic Attitudes
We will measure anti-democratic attitudes as a composite of four items about voting rights, whether court rulings should be obeyed, freedom of the press, and whether election results unfavorable to one's own party can be ignored. The wording of all items can be found here.
Support for Partisan Violence
We will measure support for partisan violence as a composite of four items asking participants about various levels of support for threatening, intimidating, or violent behavior toward people of the opposite party. The wording of all items can be found here.
Partisan Animosity
Participants will rate their feelings toward people in the opposing political party. In addition, they will be asked to distribute money between themselves and someone from the opposing political party. Partisan animosity will be the average of how much money they withhold from and how cold they feel about people in the opposite political party. The wording of all items can be found here.