Some respondents of online surveys click responses at random. Screeners or instructional manipulation checks (IMC) have become customary for identifying this strong form of satisficing. This research first analyzes the factors that condition IMC failures using an online panel survey carried out in Spain (2011–2015). Our data show that the probability of passing a screener depends mainly on the screener’s difficulty, the individuals’ intrinsic motivations for answering the survey, and past failures. We then address the substantive consequences of omitting those who fail to pass IMCs. We find that this strategy introduces an additional source of bias in descriptive analyses. The article ends with a discussion of the implications that these findings have for the use of IMCs.

It is a standard practice to include a Duty term in explanatory models of turnout. Yet the relationship between duty and voting is not that clear. Does duty really trigger voting or is it the reverse? To address this question, we present cross-lagged panel estimations of the impact of duty on turnout and of turnout on duty with two different datasets: a two-wave panel Canadian survey conducted in 2008 and 2009 and a four-wave Spanish panel conducted between 2010 and 2012. We find evidence that sense of civic duty is a true motivation that affects people’s propensity to vote, even though duty may be reinforced by the act of voting.

This article investigates the recent so-called Spanish Revolution of 2011 with a view to understanding what it reveals about the current relationship between protest and electoral modes of participation. Theories of “disaffeccted radicalism” that grew up following the 1960s period of civil unrest strongly advocated the view that protest activity boosted electoral abstention. More recent work on protest, however, has pointed to its “normalization” and linkage to more conventional modes of participation. The Spanish case of 15M constitutes a useful new test of the two theories given that it mixed an explicit rejection of the choices voters faced with a criticism of political apathy. I examine the validity of each argument using a four-wave online panel survey and fixed-effects model to unravel how engagement in the 15M protest activity affected Spaniards' attitudes towards voting. The results provide fresh support for the normalization argument about a convergence of electoral and non-electoral types of activity. What is more, protest here seems to have a socialization effect that leads people to look at elections in a more positive manner.