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Costly Values: The Limited Benefits and Potential Costs of Targeted Policy Justifications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2017

Erik Peterson  and
Gabor Simonovits
Erik Peterson
Affiliation:
Postdoctoral Fellow, Dartmouth College, Program in Quantitative Social Science, e-mail: erik.j.peterson@dartmouth.edu
Gabor Simonovits
Affiliation:
Ph.D. Candidate, New York University, Department of Politics, e-mail: simonovits@nyu.edu
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Abstract

Can politicians use targeted messages to offset position taking that would otherwise reduce their public support? We examine the effect of a politician’s justification for their tax policy stance on public opinion and identify limits on the ability of justifications to generate leeway for incongruent position taking on this issue. We draw on political communication research to establish expectations about the heterogeneous effects of justifications that employ either evidence or values based on whether or not constituents agree with the position a politician takes. In two survey experiments, we find small changes in support in response to these types of messages among targeted groups, but rule out large benefits for politicians to selectively target policy justifications toward subsets of the public. We also highlight a potential cost to selective messaging by showing that when these targeted messages reach unintended audiences they can backfire and reduce a candidate’s support.

Keywords

Elite influencerepresentationpolicy justificationstaxationissue frames
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , Summer 2017 , pp. 95 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2017 

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