Independent Media, Religiosity, and Political Preferences

The intervention consists of providing information to the subjects using the opinie.pl platform of IQS (or its mobile application). We expose a randomly drawn subsets of subjects to several pieces of publicly available information from the independent Polish media about the pedophilia cases within the Catholic Church and the relationship between the Church and the ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS). Participants will be randomly allocated among 3 groups: (i) Control, (ii) Treatment 1, and (iii) Treatment 2. The two treatments will focus on two different aspects of the message of independent Polish media: exposing pedophilia cases in the Catholic Church and exposing the mutual support between the Catholic Church and the ruling PiS party.

2020-04-29

2020-04-30

1. Trust in the Catholic Church and religiosity levels, measured by:
• Whether respondents chose to donate money to a religious or non-religious foundation (first round);
• The frequency of mass attendance during the last month (follow-up);
• Whether respondents are likely to go to Church every week in the future (follow-up);
• How respondents describe their faith, i.e., believer following the Church recommendations, believer not always following the Church recommendations, non-believer (follow-up);
• Trust in the Catholic Church, priests in their parish, episcopate, the Pope (both rounds).

2. Political support of PiS party and political preferences:
• Voting intention in the next presidential election, which may take place in May (because of COVID-19 crisis, we still do not know if the elections will be held and when) (first round);
• Whom they voted for in the election (if it takes place), or whom they would vote for if the elections were to be held next Sunday (if the election doesn't take place) (follow-up);
• The expected and actual turnout (first and follow-up rounds, respectively);
• Feeling thermometer toward political parties (both rounds);
• Trust in government, Sejm (lower house of the parliament), Senate (upper house of the parliament), president (both rounds).

All outcomes will be derived from subjects' answers to the survey questions regarding self-reported opinions and behaviors.

Auxiliary outcomes:
1. Measuring whether treatments affected respondents' opinions about issues covered in the treatments:
• Opinion about whether a mutual support between the ruling party and the Church is admissible (first round);
• Opinion about the involvement of the Catholic Church in public life and political process (first round);
• Opinions about whether the lessons of religion should take place at school or parish premises and who should pay for them (first round);
• Opinion about the financial support of the state to Church-run media;
Opinion about the importance of the problem of pedophilia in the Catholic Church (follow-up);
• Opinions about several statements related to abuse cases in the Church (both first round and follow-up);
• Whether respondents searched for information on child abuse cases (follow-up);
• Whether respondents heard about sexual abuse cases by the Church in their environment (follow-up);
• Opinion about whether victims of abuse as a child in the past should speak out (follow-up).

All outcomes will be derived from subjects' answers to the survey questions regarding self-reported opinions and behaviors.

Participants will be allocated randomly into one of the following 3 groups: (i) Control, (ii) Treatment 1, and (iii) Treatment 2. Both treatments consist of exposing respondents to several news articles and videos from the Polish mainstream media. All participants will fill out surveys before and after the treatment which will be used to estimate the treatment effects.

Participants will answer questions before the treatment concerning their basic socio-economic characteristics, their interest in politics and political preferences, their religiosity, the sources they use for news information, and whether they have access to internet at home.

After the treatment, both control and treatment groups will answer a set of questions about their voting intentions in the upcoming presidential election (scheduled to take place on May 10, 2020 but can be postponed due to Covid-19 pandemic), their views on several statements related to pedophilia in the Church, to the relationship between the Church and the state, involvement of the Church in politics, and their trust levels towards various institutions. Moreover, they will be asked to select a charity to which they would like us to donate money. The choice will be among a set of two religious and two non-religious charities. (Details provided in the attached pre-analysis plan.)

We will conduct a follow-up survey approximately three to four weeks after the intervention. In the follow-up survey, we will ask whether they voted and for whom if the election if it takes place, otherwise whom they’d vote for if it took place next Sunday, several questions on pedophilia in the Polish Church, and whether respondents sought any information on cases of pedophilia in the media or online, how many times they attended a mass (online or offline) and whether they intend to go to church every week in the future. (Details provided in the attached pre-analysis plan.)

Randomization done in the office of the survey company by a computer.

We perform stratified randomization across individuals. We randomly assign one third of individuals in each strata (24 in total), defined by gender (2 groups) x age brackets (4 groups) x education levels (3 groups), into the control group, treatment 1, and treatment 2.

No

9,000 voting-age individuals.

9,000 voting-age individuals.

3,000 individuals control, 3,000 individuals treatment 1, and 3,000 individuals treatment 2.