6,230 rated or chosen profiles from 623 respondents, in up to 5 tasks of 2 profiles varying on 4 attributes.

About this table

Description	US opt-in panel respondents (n = 623, August 2024) made 5 choices between two countries described by economic wellbeing, press freedom, presidential power/elections and rule of law, each at a normative, illiberal-majority or illiberal-minority level.
Reference	Mortenson, C., & Nisbet, E. (2025). Benefit seekers or principle holders? Experimental evidence on Americans' democratic trade-offs. Perspectives on Politics.
DOI	10.1017/S1537592725104052
Licence	CC0 1.0
Source data	https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YPNPMA

Notes

Conjoint table (irw_conjoint). choice = 'Please select which country you would MOST prefer to live in' (two countries with different features to their democracy), forced choice, no opt-out, 5 tasks. 15 respondents screened out at an attention check before the conjoint are excluded (623 = article N); 6 who failed the post-conjoint check are kept with cov_attention_pass_2 = 0. Demographics are unlabelled Qualtrics codes.

These notes describe the source data, which the IRW reproduces as released. All notes are listed on the Data Notes page.

Design

Topic	democracy institutions
A profile represents	place
Country	US
Language shown	en
Language of stored levels	en
Task order	recorded in the deposit
Profile position	recorded in the deposit

Outcomes:

choice	Democracy comes in many different flavors. Below are two countries with different features to their democracy. Please select which country you would MOST prefer to live in from the selections below. Read each item CAREFULLY, as the options will vary in each round. [choice, forced]

Columns

attr_economic_wellbeingattr_president_electionsattr_press_speechattr_rule_of_lawattrpos_economic_wellbeingattrpos_president_electionsattrpos_press_speechattrpos_rule_of_lawchoicecov_agecov_attention_pass_2cov_duration_seccov_education_codecov_gender_codecov_ideology_economiccov_ideology_politicalcov_ideology_socialcov_interest_governmentcov_interest_politicscov_party_id_codecov_race_codeidprofiletask

The layout (one row per respondent, task and profile; choice/rating outcomes; attr_ columns holding each attribute level as displayed) is defined in the IRW conjoint standard. What the outcomes asked is under Design above.

Get the data

Download CSVno account needed Browse on Redivisexplore and query Croissant metadataHugging Face, Kaggle, OpenML

Or load it directly in R or Python (both need a free Redivis account; the first call opens a browser to sign in):

# R
install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("itemresponsewarehouse/Rpkg")
library(irw)
df <- irw_fetch("mortenson_2025_democracy_tradeoffs", source = "conj")

# Python
pip install irw

import irw
df = irw.fetch("mortenson_2025_democracy_tradeoffs", source="conj")

How to cite

@article{Mortenson_2025, title={Benefit Seekers or Principle Holders? Experimental Evidence on Americans’ Democratic Trade-Offs}, ISSN={1541-0986}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1537592725104052}, DOI={10.1017/s1537592725104052}, journal={Perspectives on Politics}, publisher={Cambridge University Press (CUP)}, author={Mortenson, Chloe Rose and Nisbet, Erik C.}, year={2025}, month=Dec, pages={1–23} }

Respondents	623
Rows (one per respondent, task and profile)	6,230
Tasks per respondent (most)	5
Profiles per task	2
Attributes	4
Tasks with no profile chosen	0

IRW version	v584
Redivis dataset	irw_conjoint v4.2
Redivis dataset DOI	10.57761/qkye-q530
Manifest pin for this IRW version	v4.2
Metadata source	irw_meta v44.0

mortenson_2025_democracy_tradeoffs