BCAD faculty affiliate Gabriel Lenz’s research on political opinion formation was featured in The Washington Post

Gabe Lenz was quoted in The Washington Post:

“Leader persuasion” is a well-documented phenomenon in political science. Before the 2000 election, for instance, more than two-thirds of Americans broadly supported giving workers the option to invest Social Security funds in the stock market. Then GOP nominee George W. Bush promoted the idea and Democrat Al Gore opposed it, and the issue became central to the election. Suddenly, as University of California at Berkeley political scientist Gabriel Lenz demonstrated in his 2012 book, “Follow the Leader?,” Gore voters soured on the policy. Between August and late October 2000, ardent Gore supporters became about 60 percentage points more likely to oppose the idea than strong Bush supporters were, according to an analysis of the National Annenberg Election Survey.

Abroad, we see leader persuasion at work, too. In Britain, in 1997, the Conservative Party campaigned hard against further European integration, awakening a dormant issue. Conservative voters, Berkeley’s Lenz notes, subsequently grew more opposed to integration, while Labour Party members — who had previously been only a bit less skeptical than the Tories on this question — increased their support (presaging the Brexit divide two decades later).

The full article is available here.

Original article

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