Experimental Design Details
The entire study consists of a short online survey expected to take less than 10 minutes for respondents to complete. Respondents will be adults based in Peru.
The survey begins with a brief set of questions (gender, age, education, language spoken, political ideology on a left-right scale).
Then, each respondent is provided with two policy briefs. One regards bilingual education (school children in Peru being taught in both Spanish and an indigenous language). The second regards informal workers (many Peruvian workers do not have a formal contract with their employer). Whether they see the bilingual education or informality brief first or second is randomly assigned. Below we describe a case where bilingual education is shown first.
At the time respondents see the bilingual education policy brief, the Qualtrics platform randomly assigns respondents to either a "progressive message" (arguing in favor of bilingual education) or a "conservative message" (arguing against it). Moreover, we cross-randomize the use of gender-neutral language in the messages. Messages can be: i) not gender-neutral, ii) 50% gender-neutral, or iii) 100% gender-neutral status. The difference between the “50%” and “100%” versions is whether the nouns are explicitly mentioned in both male or female form whenever possible or a generic masculine noun is substituted by a non-gendered noun 50% of the time. For example, when referring to a set of employees, the gender-neutral version of the brief would use “empleados”, the 100% gender-neutral would always use “empleados y empleadas”, but the 50% version would use “personal”, the Spanish version of “personnel” which is a word that does not connote gender and (in traditional Spanish grammar) could refer to a set of female-only employees.
Then the respondent will be asked whether or not they support the policy and would be willing to sign an online petition in favor of it.
After this, the respondents will also be provided with a brief on informal workers, that will have an analogous set of (randomly assigned) variations, both in the progressive and conservative message dimensions and in the use of gender-neutral language or not. In this context, the progressive message suggests the government should have more resources to enforce labor laws, and the conservative message argues that labor laws should be simplified to lower labor force informality. Again, these messages are based on factual and research-based arguments.
Similarly, respondents will be asked if they support the policy position they just read about, and whether they would be willing to sign an online petition in favor of it.
A brief final set of questions is then asked and the survey concludes.