A new study by Northwestern University asks whether voters approve of politicians who use the power of their office to retaliate against corporate political speech criticizing the politician's actions.
The researchers sought to determine whether voters would consider retaliation against a company an abuse of political power, and if voter opinion would depend on whether they had the same political party affiliation as the politician.
In February and April of 2024, the researchers surveyed 1,000 adults to collect opinions on actions of increasing severity a governor could take in response to public criticism from an in-state business.
Survey participants were randomly assigned to a mock newspaper report with one of three conditions: "no attack" which states that the governor is undeterred by the criticism; a "verbal rebuke" in which the governor is reported as having spoken out against the business, but with no subsequent action; and "retributive action," which included removing tax benefits and calling for a statewide boycott.
The case is useful for testing whether there has been a shift in America's long held political norms, including ambivalence about the role of business in politics and the countervailing norm of politicians not using their office for retribution.
"We expected results were going to be entirely reflective of partisanship and completely driven by the voters' partisan match or mismatch with the elected official," said Principal Investigator Mary McGrath, assistant professor of political science at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern.
Key findings
In the survey results, voters showed no difference in how they responded to no attack and the verbal rebuke by the governor. In those scenarios, partisanship was the largest factor in how people viewed the governor's actions.
However, when it came to retribution against the company by the governor, the drop among in-party respondents was large enough to shift them from a positive vote intention to a negative vote intention.
Survey responses to the harsh attack included comments like "the governor shouldn't be acting like a dictator" and "this is more like what a tyrant would do, going after a business that criticizes your policies."
"We were surprised to find no real difference between Republican and Democrat voters, with neither group willing to give a pass to members of their own party," McGrath said. "There was even evidence of voters responding more negatively to elected officials within their own party who used the powers of their office to punish."
Implications
"While we can't say how big or small the effect is within the context of the real world, at a fundamental level we can see voters are not happy with retribution," McGrath said.
"Given how partisan our politics have become, I expected that voters would approve of almost any behavior so long as it came from their own party, but that simply was not the case," said lead author Evan Myers, who spearheaded the project as part of his honors thesis at Northwestern.
"The study has left me feeling slightly more optimistic about people's ability to recognize and condemn anti-democratic actions," Myers said.
"Electoral costs of political retaliation: bipartisan rejection of attacks on corporate speech," was recently published by Cambridge University Press's Business and Politics journal. In addition to Evans and McGrath, Anna Wander is also a coauthor on the paper.
