Perceptions of political extremism in the American public and elected officials

This document describes a pre-analysis plan for two data collections about perceptions of political extremism: one conducted on a sample of the American public and one on a sample of elected officials in the United States at the state, county, and local level. Both employ the same kinds of measures, using both open-ended survey questions and a conjoint experiment to evaluate what individuals consider to be extreme and how they weight different kinds of extremism. In addition, the public sample randomly assigns half of the participants to consider voting or extremism more generally to determine if considerations are different in both scenarios. At the writing of this analysis plan, the data for the public sample have been collected (N=2,500), the data have yet to be collected for the elected official sample, and no data cleaning or analysis have been done.