Democracies face rising concerns about extremism. At the same time, citizens and political
actors define extremism in different ways with different consequences. In light of this, what
do American citizens and elected officials consider to be extreme, and what political
penalties are associated with extreme behavior and beliefs? To answer these questions, we
rely on three surveys, two of the American public and one with American elected officials.
Respondents' open-ended definitions of extremism and two conjoint experiments suggest …

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 …