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

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.