Replication Data for: Priorities for Preventive Action: Explaining Americans' Divergent Reactions to 100 Public Risks

Why do Americans’ priorities for combating risks like terrorism, climate change, and violent crime often seem so uncorrelated with the dangers that those risks objectively present? Many scholars believe the answer to this question is that heuristics, biases, and ignorance cause voters to misperceive risk magnitudes. By contrast, this paper argues that Americans’ risk priorities primarily reflect judgments about the extent to which some victims deserve more protection than others and the degree to which it is (in)appropriate for government to intervene in different areas of social life. The paper supports this argument with evidence drawn from a survey of 3,000 Americans, using pairwise comparisons to elicit novel measures of how respondents perceive nine dimensions of 100 life-threatening risks. These data indicate that the key to understanding Americans’ divergent reactions to risk lies more with their values than with their grasp of factual information.