How about you? Do you support or oppose increasing the minimum wage to over $10 an hour? Donald Trump has said that he supports this policy. To increase the minimum wage to over $10 an hour. Please indicate whether or not you support or oppose the statement. One-third of the participants read statements where they were told Trump supported a liberal position, like this: These are the types of issues conservatives and liberals tend to be sharply divided on.īarber and Pope wondered: Would Republicans be more likely to endorse a liberal policy if they were told Donald Trump supported it? Participants were asked to rate whether they supported or opposed policies like a higher minimum wage, the nuclear agreement with Iran, restrictions on abortion access, background checks for gun owners, and so on. In their test, they wondered: Are Trump’s supporters ideological, or will they follow him wherever his policy whims go? Right after Trump’s inauguration, they ran an online experiment with 1,300 Republicans. Its publication is forthcoming in the political science journal the Forum. In January 2017, Barber and his BYU colleague Jeremy Pope designed an experiment to take advantage of that fact. But for a president, Trump is historically scattershot. Yes, Trump has been extremely consistent in some areas: He’s made policies that make it harder for people who live in Muslim-majority nations to enter the United States, he shares Republican animosity toward Obamacare, and he’s reducing the role of the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies. A recent experiment found Republicans are more likely to adopt liberal policies when Trump supports liberal policies alash/Getty Creative Images Trump gives political scientists the chance to find out how far. John McCain, a former GOP presidential nominee - were harshly critical. And they approved despite the overwhelmingly negative press that followed it, and even after prominent Republicans - like Sen. An Axios/SurveyMonkey poll released July 19 found that 79 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s press conference with Putin. The research here predicts there won’t be a pivotal moment where Republicans around the country stop supporting Trump en masse. In essence, Trump is providing an unprecedented opportunity to test the “follow the leader” theory of political science - and to see if Trump will push his followers to a breaking point. How much power do presidents have in swaying public opinion? Will the base always follow even if a president swings wildly from one position to another?Īnd there’s another key question at play here that matters a lot for the future of Trump’s presidency: If prominent Republican leaders start breaking away from Trump because they don’t like his ideas or temperament, will the base also break? And rarely do they get a real-life experiment like Trump to help them answer some huge questions at the heart of democracy: Researchers like him have long tried to understand the power of leaders and the willingness of the public to hold them accountable. “It’s very hard to find instances where prior policy views seem to drive later voting or decisions” “We’ve never had a federal elected official, let alone the leader of a party or the president of the United States, who is so easily moved from one position to another without offering any sort of justification or apology or explanation,” Michael Barber, a political scientist at Brigham Young University, said last year. On other issues, his policy preferences have been clear as mud: “I don’t want to have guns in classrooms, although in some cases, teachers should have guns in classrooms, frankly,” he told Fox News in 2016.Īnd where he is more consistent - like in his deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin, most stunningly in the recent joint press conference in Helsinki - he is often at odds with many prominent figures in his own party.Īll this makes this period of history extremely interesting for political scientists and psychologists to study. But often, and more so than any president in memory, he lacks a consistent political ideology.ĭuring the campaign, Trump took five different positions on abortion in three days.
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