Is It the Message or the Messenger? Examining Movement in Immigration Beliefs

Hassan Afrouzi, Carolina Arteaga and Emily Weisburst

Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, 2024, vol. 2, issue 2, 244 - 297

Abstract: How do political leaders affect constituents’ beliefs? Is it rhetoric, identity, or the interaction of the two that matters? Using a large-scale experiment about immigration beliefs, we decompose the relative importance of partisan messages versus leader sources. Participants listen to anti-immigrant and pro-immigrant speeches from both Presidents Obama and Trump. These treatments are benchmarked to identical speeches recorded by an actor to control for message content, and to nonideological presidential speeches to control for leader priming. We find that political leaders influence beliefs beyond the content of their messages when leaders deliver unanticipated messages to individuals in their own party.

Date: 2024
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Working Paper: Is it the Message or the Messenger? Examining Movement in Immigration Beliefs (2023)
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