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

Abstract

Recent work on voting behavior and political attitudes has established the relevance of anti-intellectual (Merkley, E. (2020). Anti-intellectualism, populism, and motivated resistance to expert consensus. Public Opinion Quarterly, 84(1), 24–48. doi: 10.1093/poq/nfz053; Motta, M. (2018a). The dynamics and political implications of anti-intellectualism in the United States. American Politics Research, 46(3), 465–498. doi: 10.1177/1532673X17719507; Motta, M. (2018b). The polarizing effect of the March for Science on attitudes toward scientists. PS, Political Science & Politics, 51(4), 782. doi: 10.1017/S1049096518000938), anti-science (Mede, N. G., & Schäfer, M. S. (2020). Science-related populism: Conceptualizing populist demands toward science. Public Understanding of Science, 29(5), 473–491. doi: 10.1177/0963662520924259; Rekker, R. (2021). The nature and origins of political polarization over science. Public Understanding of Science, 30(4), 352–368. doi: 10.1177%2F0963662521989193) and anti-expertise (Brewer, M. D. (2016). Populism in American politics. The Forum, 14, 249–264. doi: 10.1515/for-2016-0021; Oliver, J. E., & Rahn, W. M. (2016). Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 Election. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 667(1), 189–206. doi: 10.1177/0002716216662639) 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, D. J. (2016). Persuasion: Theory and research. (3rd ed.) SAGE Publications, Inc.; Pornpitakpan, C. (2004). The persuasiveness of source credibility: A critical review of five decades’ evidence. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 34, 243–281. doi: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2004.tb02547.x). 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.