Replication Data for: State Action and Moral Attitudes toward Sexual Consent

In recent years, several countries have in moved from a coercion-based to a consent-based legal definition of rape. Building on expressive law theory, we discuss how a move to consent-based rape legislation may shift moral attitudes toward sexual consent. In this Registered Report, we test this prediction experimentally in Norway, where a proposal was recently made to include consent in the current coercion-based legal framework. Providing information treatments about current and proposed legislation to a representative sample of Norwegian citizens and large additional samples of civil servants and elected representatives, allows us to test the expressive power of the proposed law while holding information about current legislation constant. Contrary to our pre-registered hypothesis, we find a small backlash effect among citizens who are informed about the proposed legal reform. In our exploratory sub-group analysis, we find a positive effect of our information treatment only in the sample of elected politicians.