Context-Dependent Moderation Shifts in the Voting Option Trade-off Evaluation (VOTE) Task

In this study, we developed an online version of the Voting Option Trade-off Evaluation (VOTE) task and applied it to university and graduate students in Japan. Participants first selected two policy domains they considered relatively important and two relatively unimportant, and then evaluated budget allocation proposals between paired policy domains under directionally biased constrained choice set. To capture the contextual influence, we computed a shift index reflecting deviations from neutral allocations toward left- or right-leaning options. A two-way repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of option-set orientation structure, whereas neither policy importance nor the interaction effect reached significance. These results indicate that voters’ allocation judgments are systematically shaped by the structure of the available options, independent of subjective policy importance.