Responding to Policy Signals? An Experimental Study on the Relationship between Information about Policy Adoption and Policy Support

Do individuals respond to information about the adoption of a law? This paper contributes to our understanding of policy legitimacy and of policy feedback effects on public opinion by experimentally testing whether information about the adoption of a law incorporating a policy position leads to higher levels of public support for this policy position. It also examines whether the acceptance of a policy is influenced by information on the involvement of particular institutions (such as the Constitutional Court) in the legislative process (e.g. Franklin/Kosaki 1989; Mondak 1994). We rely on theoretical approaches about information processing in individual decision-making, status quo bias (e.g. Eidelman/Crandall 2012), and the effects of institutional endorsements (e.g. Bartels/Mutz 2009) to develop hypotheses on the cognitive mechanisms through which a policy change might affect policy attitudes. Particular attention is paid to the influence of ideological predispositions. It is also discussed and analysed whether citizens’ political awareness on the one hand and feelings of threat on the other induce different responses to these policy signals. The paper uses data from an online survey experiment that has been conducted in Germany in 2017. The experiment focuses on the issue of data retention in the domain of domestic security policy. We provide evidence that the public is receptive to signals about policy adoption and about the involvement of particular institutions in the legislative process. However, ideological differences influence the extent to which people react to these signals.