Disagreement Spillovers

TL;DR

This study shows that bundling economic messages with social moral stances weakens economic persuasion among those who disagree with the social stance, due to identity-based distancing effects.

Contribution

It provides experimental evidence that bundling social and economic issues can backfire in persuasion, especially among opponents of the social stance.

Findings

Bundling social and economic messages reduces persuasion among social stance opponents by 13-20 percentage points.

Support does not increase when social stance is aligned with the message.

Results are consistent across policy pairs and are largely one-directional from social to economic issues.

Abstract

Political messages increasingly bundle economic policy arguments with moral social policy stances. Using survey experiments with roughly 6,500 U.S. adults, I show that such bundling sharply weakens economic persuasion among respondents who disagree with the social stance: support falls by 13-20 percentage points relative to when the same economic message is sent alone, sometimes moving below pre-message levels. Bundling an aligned social stance does not increase persuasion. The main results are not driven by party cues, generalize across policy pairs, and are largely one-directional from social to economic issues, consistent with the predictions of a model of identity-based distancing.