The Long-lasting Effects of Newspaper Op-Eds on Public Opinion

Abstract

Do newspaper opinion pieces change the minds of those who read them? We conduct two randomized panel survey experiments on elite and mass convenience samples to estimate the effects of five op-eds on policy attitudes. We find very large average treatment effects on target issues, equivalent to shifts of approximately 0.5 scale points on a 7-point scale, that persist for at least one month. We find very small and insignificant average treatment effects on non-target issues, suggesting that our subjects read, understood, and were persuaded by the arguments presented in these op-eds. We find limited evidence of treatment effect heterogeneity by party identification: Democrats, Republicans, and independents all appear to move in the predicted direction by similar magnitudes. We conduct this study on both a sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and a sample of elites. Despite large differences in demographics and initial political beliefs, we find that op-eds were persuasive to both the mass public and elites, but marginally more persuasive among the mass public. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence of the everyday nature of persuasion.

Political probity increases trust in government: Evidence from randomized survey experiments

“…Understanding the causes of political trust has been an important research priority since the "trust in government" question first appeared in the American National Election Studies (ANES) Survey in 1958 [16,35]. In this article we have used randomized survey experiments to collect new data about political probity, a widely cited potential causal mechanism [6,[13][14][15][16][17][18]35]. The causal estimates reported here support this large body of theory and observational studies that have linked probity to popular trust in government.…”

“…Consistent with this conjecture, we also find that subjects in the Honest treatment were much more likely to say the article changed their views even though subjects in the Corrupt treatment viewed the article as more persuasive (See Supplementary Tables 1-10 in S1 Appendix). Another caveat is that although prior experimental research has shown that Op-Eds have strong persuasive effects that persist for at least a month [18], we cannot directly asses the durability of the effects induced here since follow-up surveys were not conducted. A related experiment found televised incivility in political discourse decreased trust in government, and that these effects were detectable in follow-up surveys three weeks later, attrition and sample size constraints limited any firm concslusions about persistence at a one month follow up [29].…”

“…Here we use randomized survey experiments to investigate the consequences of providing information about the presence (or absence) of probity with putative opinion pieces ("Op-Eds"), instruments of persuasion that have strong and lasting effects on public opinion across a variety of topics [18]. In two experiments-one on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and a direct replication on a population based online panel-we find that exposure to a single Op-Ed about the probity of political elites significantly increased political trust.…”

Does Administrative Burden Influence Public Support for Government Programs? Evidence from a Survey Experiment

“…While the durability of some treatment effects in experiments is found to be limited (see Druckman and Nelson ; Mutz and Reeves ), some studies, particularly those with informational treatments, may have more enduring effects. Coppock, Ekins, and Kirby (), for example, find that informational treatments, in their case op‐ed pieces, have effects that last at least 30 days, though at approximately half the magnitude, which they argue may indicate underlying attitude changes. While less detailed, our treatments are informational.…”

Understanding Perceptions of Problematic Facebook Use

“…Previous research has shown that what people read or hear about can influence their beliefs [28,65]. Reading an op-ed can result in substantial, long-term shifts in a person's policy opinions [24]. Further, previous qualitative work found that social narratives about smartphone addiction and its negative consequences can lead to people perceiving their own smartphone use negatively [62].…”