Do Populists Really Reject Expert Judgment?: Expert Consensus and Support for Clean Water Act Protections

Abstract

Abstract Recent work on voting behavior and political attitudes has established the relevance of anti-intellectual (Merkley, 2020; Motta, 2018), anti-science (Mede & Schafer, 2020; Rekker, 2021) and anti-expertise (Brewer, 2020; Oliver & Rahn, 2016) attitudes in politics. However, the increasing relevance of anti-expertise attitudes raises a paradox, as one of the most well-established claims of the persuasion literature concerns the influence of expert sources on attitudes (O’Keefe, 2016; Pornpitakpan, 2004). The current paper explores the influence of messages based on public and expert consensus, as well as the interaction of these messages with expressed mistrust of experts relative to the public. The issue we explore concerns environmental regulations relating to water, an issue on which partisan elites are divided, but one that has not played a highly salient role in recent political discourse. We find that mistrust of experts is negatively related to support for these regulations, as expected, but that, contrary to prior research, increases in mistrust of experts in fact enhanced the impact of the expert message. We discuss potential explanations for why this pattern of results differs from prior work.