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Public Approval, Policy Issues, and Partisanship in the American Presidency: Examining the 2019–2020 Trump Impeachment and Acquittal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2021

Meena Bose Open the ORCID record for Meena Bose [Opens in a new window]  and
Craig M. Burnett Open the ORCID record for Craig M. Burnett [Opens in a new window]
Meena Bose
Affiliation:
Hofstra University, USA
Craig M. Burnett
Affiliation:
Hofstra University, USA
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Abstract

Although much of the United States undoubtedly was aware of the impeachment hearings and trial for President Donald Trump in 2019–2020, the extent to which information about those events influenced the public remains unknown. Building on scholarship about public opinion and democratic governance, we attempted to fill this knowledge gap through a unique survey. We asked half of our sample to answer three factual questions pertaining to Trump’s first impeachment trial. We ran a quasi-experiment on the other half, trying to influence their view of the trial by informing them of the same three facts that we asked the first group. The quasi-experiment demonstrates that support for acquittal was largely static and that partisanship strongly influences whether the public accepts the veracity and importance of political information. Consequently, civic knowledge today appears to have a limited—perhaps even nonexistent—effect on public attitudes about American politics.

Type
Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 266 - 274
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Supplementary material: Link

Bose and Burnett Replication Materials on Dataverse

Replication Materials

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/145ZMF
Link