Depoliticizing Policy Reform: Non-Partisan Expert Cues and Public Opinion Change on Financial Regulation

33 Pages Posted: 26 Sep 2011

See all articles by Nathan M. Jensen

Nathan M. Jensen

Washington University in St. Louis - Department of Political Science

René Lindstädt

University of Birmingham

Date Written: September 19, 2011

Abstract

The global financial crisis has increased pressures on governments to pursue wide-ranging banking reform, highlighting the importance of domestic responses to globalization. In this paper, we study mass policy preferences on banking reform as well as the change of those preferences in response to elite cues. Our paper makes two contributions. First, rather than focusing on the effect of partisan cues on mass policy preferences - a well-studied question in public opinion research - we explore the influence of non-partisan expert cues on mass policy preferences. Second, our study specifically focuses on the global dimension of banking regulation by eliciting opinions about global solutions (concerted reform efforts across countries) as well as domestic solutions (local reform efforts independent of those in other countries) to the banking crisis. We empirically address these questions by way of a survey experiment conducted in the United States in 2010. Based on our empirical findings, we can draw three conclusions. First, in the absence of cues, preferences on banking reform are almost exclusively driven by respondents' partisanship. Second, responsiveness to non-partisan expert cues is independent of partisanship. Finally, we find that the effect of non-partisan expert cues is conditional on political knowledge: while high knowledge individuals are less likely than low knowledge individuals to change their opinions on banking reform in response to ambiguous non-partisan expert cues, political knowledge does increase the likelihood of opinion change when the expert cue is unambiguous.

Keywords: Globalization, Financial Crisis, Banking Crisis, Financial Reform, Banking Reform, Public Opinion, Heuristics, Information Processing, Cues, Experts, Policy Preferences, Preference Change, Mass Behavior, Survey Experiment, Survey, United States, CCES

JEL Classification: C90, D83, E61, E65, F15, F42, K32

Suggested Citation

Jensen, Nathan M. and Lindstaedt, Rene, Depoliticizing Policy Reform: Non-Partisan Expert Cues and Public Opinion Change on Financial Regulation (September 19, 2011). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1933799 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1933799

Nathan M. Jensen

Washington University in St. Louis - Department of Political Science ( email )

219 Eliot Hall
St. Louis, MO 63130
United States

Rene Lindstaedt (Contact Author)

University of Birmingham ( email )

Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT
United Kingdom

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