In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Sienna Nordquist, covers the new article by Zachary P. Dickson and Sara B. Hobolt, “Elite Cues and Noncompliance.”
Donald Trump is infamous for many things, but one thing he is most well-known for is his controversial social media messages. While most US presidents relied on the pulpit of the traditional media to get across their message, Trump chose instead to speak directly to his supporters and voters from 280 characters on their phone screen. Who listened to these messages, and how did it change their behavior?—that is the key question Zachary Dickson and Sara Hobolt answer in their recent APSR publication. In “Elite Cues and Noncompliance,” they find that the public listens to its own partisan leaders and is willing to act out against laws which those leaders find unjust.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major focus of recent research on trust in government, and political behavior. Because the pandemic days were so uncertain and scary, the public did not have many predefined beliefs about what a government ought to do or how politicians should respond. This made citizens more vulnerable to the positions of key leaders in the crisis. In a context made even more fraught by high polarization, this meant listening to the loudest party leaders at the time. Cue Donald Trump’s social media messages. In mid-April 2020—amidst many state-led lockdowns—Trump called for the liberation of Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia from stay-at-home orders. Dickson and Hobolt show that Republicans heard this message, listened, and reacted. In the immediate week after Trump’s social media calls for liberation in these states with Democratic governors, people in Republican counties traveled further, left home more often, and experienced more arrests of white Americans.
Dickson and Hobolt demonstrate that counties in the states which Trump identified as needing liberation witnessed higher mobility and home departures (as measured by Meta’s app tracking and confirmed by Google mobility data) and saw more arrests of white Americans (as recorded by the FBI). This stayed true even if they only compared the effect between Republican counties, or only in states with Democratic governors. They also show that these behavioral changes were relatively long-lasting. The largest increases in movement and leaving home happened five days after Trump’s tweets for liberation. Given how quickly the news cycle changed on a daily or hourly basis during the pandemic, it is remarkable that the effects of a few Tweets
could be seen in individuals’ decisions to violate stay-at-home orders almost a week later. Dickson and Hobolt also study how Twitter users interacted with Trump’s original social media messages calling for state-based liberation. By grouping users’ replies by topic, they find that calls for violence, armed rebellion, and even negative feelings about Trump were some of the more widespread reactions.
“The anger Trump’s social media messages elicited not only motivated some Americans to leave their homes more, against the orders of their state governor, but also increased criminal behavior.”Importantly, Trump’s calls for liberation were not heard or heeded by all Americans. Instead, they primarily affected the behavior of his supporters. The evidence for Trump’s social media messages driving Republican behavior more than Democratic behavior is shown in Dickson and Hobolt’s analysis of arrests. Crucially, they assume that white arrestees are more likely to be Trump supporters than non-white arrestees. The authors admit that this is not the best measure of political affiliation, but arrest records do not record the party affiliation of the individual arrested. Using race as an assumed stand-in for party affiliation, they display how arrest rates for white Americans increased in states which were targeted by Trump’s liberation tweets. In a major contrast, there was no change in the arrest rates of non-white Americans. This suggests that voters pay attention to the communication of party leaders online, but only their own party supporters will change their behavior as a result.
As democracies continue to be highly polarized and the public remains committed to receiving political information through social media, how political leaders’ online messages affect their supporters’ (and opponents’) behavior will only increase in importance. Dickson and Hobolt add an important angle to our understanding of this twenty-first century relationship between politicians and their voters. Their interesting study shows how quickly political messaging can affect how the public thinks and acts in the real world. And, this motivation for behavioral change can manifest itself in many ways. The anger Trump’s social media messages elicited not only motivated some Americans to leave their homes more, against the orders of their state governor, but also increased criminal behavior. Trump’s upcoming return to the White House amplifies the importance of paying attention to the unique signaling effect of his and his party’s social media communication on political behavior—towards both compliance and noncompliance.
- Sienna Nordquist is a 3rd year PhD Student in Social and Political Science at Bocconi University, Italy. She is also a visiting researcher at the WZB’s Transformations of Democracy Unit in Berlin, Germany. Originally from the US, Sienna was a Robert W. Woodruff Scholar at Emory University, received her Master’s degree from the LSE’s European Institute, and has been a Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
- DICKSON, ZACHARY P., and SARA B. HOBOLT. 2024. “Elite Cues and Noncompliance.” American Political Science Review, 1–17.
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