Disagreement Spillovers

Abstract: As US political party leaders increasingly take stances both on economic and cultural (i.e., social policy) issues, the economic views of opposite cultural groups are growing apart. This paper explores a novel explanation for this phenomenon. I provide experimental evidence that adding social policy content to a policy message pushes those disagreeing with the social policy to disagree also with the economic content of the message. As my results suggest regular deviations from Bayesian explanations, I propose a model of identity-based belief updating that predicts the main regularities found in the experiment. Finally, I shed light on opinion leaders' incentives to strengthen the association between social policy and economic policy views.