Disagreement Spillovers

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.