Is There a Trump Effect? An Experiment on Political Polarization and Audience Costs

Abstract

Does President Trump face domestic costs for foreign policy inconsistency? Will co-partisans and opposition-partisans equally punish Donald Trump for issuing flippant international threats and backing down? While the president said he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing voters, the literature consistently shows that individuals, regardless of partisanship, disapprove of leaders who jeopardize the country’s reputation for credibility and resolve. Given the atypical nature of the Trump presidency, and the severe partisan polarization surrounding it, we investigate whether the logic of audience costs still applies in the Trump era. Using a unique experiment fielded during the 2016 presidential transition, we show that Republicans and Democrats impose equal audience costs on President Trump. And by varying the leader’s identity, between Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and “The President,” we demonstrate that the public adheres to a non-partisan logic in punishing leaders who renege on threats. Yet we also find Presidents Trump and Obama can reduce the magnitude of audience costs by justifying backing down as being “in America’s interest.” Even Democrats, despite their doubts of Donald Trump’s credibility, accept such justifications. Our findings encourage further exploration of partisan cues, leader-level attributes, and leader-level reputations.

We Have It Totally Under Control? Exploring the Effects of Ideology and Knowing Someone Diagnosed With COVID-19 on Evaluations of President Trump’s Leadership on the Pandemic

“…Our results show that citizens who do not know anyone diagnosed with the virus tend to have highly polarized political attitudes. This aligns with recent research which shows that the public has highly polarized opinions about President Trump and his administration (e.g., Abramowitz & McCoy, 2019; Evers et al, 2019; Schaffner et al, 2018). However, we find that this polarizing response decreases once the pandemic becomes personal and a citizen knows someone diagnosed with COVID-19.…”

The Meddling American Voter? How Norms, Interests, and Great Power Rivalries Affect U.S. Public Support for Partisan Electoral Interventions Abroad

“…To establish whether respondents’ evaluation of the president was affected by how we identified the president in our experiments, we conducted a pre-test using similar scenarios in summer 2020 that varied whether Trump was identified as president or not (including whether the scenario was specified as happening after both potential consecutive Trump terms had ended). We found no variation across those treatment conditions (see Appendix), in line with other findings (Evers, Fisher, and Schaaf 2019).…”

Abstraction and Detail in Experimental Design

“…The second dimension of abstraction involves the identity of the actors invoked in experimental vignettes: Are they real or artificial? Some experimenters explicitly use real‐world actors in contexts ripped from the headlines, as in Boettcher and Cobb's (2006) study of how casualty frames shape support for the war in Iraq, or Evers, Fisher, and Schaaf (2019), who experimentally investigate audience costs using Donald Trump and Barack Obama. In this sense, the artificiality of the actors in an experiment is distinct from the hypotheticality of the situations in which actors are embedded since experimenters often use real‐world actors in hypothetical scenarios.…”