The Effects of Presidential Engagement in K–12 Education Policy on Public Opinion and Political Polarization

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 12:40 pm
  In Roundtable Session: National Education Politics and Policy (Table 27)

Abstract

What happens when U.S. presidents intervene in education policy debates? We analyze the results of 18 survey experiments conducted between 2009 and 2021 with nationally representative samples of U.S. adults. Each experiment explores the effect of a presidential endorsement of a specific education policy on participants’ attitudes toward that policy. Our results indicate that presidential engagement in education policy issues typically does little to move public opinion in the direction of the president’s preferred policies. Instead, the chief consequence is increased polarization among the public along partisan lines. A key exception applies to endorsements of policies that diverge from the traditional position of the president’s own party, which tend to shift aggregate public opinion modestly in favor of those policies.

Authors

• David Houston, George Mason University

• Alyssa Barone, George Mason University