For the first time ever, a national referendum has decided the fate of stem cell research. Swiss voters have spoken, so their researchers can now get going. Michael Gross reports.

Peace processes are complex, protracted, and contentious involving significant bargaining and compromising among various societal and political stakeholders. In civil war terminations, it is pertinent to measure the pulse of the nation to ensure that the peace process is responsive to citizens' concerns. Social media yields tremendous power as a tool for dialogue, debate, organization, and mobi...

Benefits from providing a local public good such as landscape protection may depend on individuals’ physical surroundings, as well as on socio-economic factors such as income. A framework is formulated that describes public support for regional landscape protection as a function of socio-economic variables and land use patterns. Models are then estimated using data from a referendum on increasi...

An experiment was designed to account for intention-behavior discrepancies by applying the theory of planned behavior to contingent valuation. College students (N = 160) voted in hypothetical and real payment referenda to contribute $8 to a scholarship fund. Overestimates of willingness to pay in the hypothetical referendum could not be attributed to moderately favorable latent dispositions. In...

When studying sensitive issues including corruption, prejudice, and sexual behavior, researchers have increasingly relied upon indirect questioning techniques to mitigate such known problems of direct survey questions as under-reporting and nonresponse. However, there have been surprisingly few empirical validation studies of these indirect techniques, because the information required to verify...