The Supreme Court accords starkly different treatment to private expression and government speech for First Amendment purposes. While regulation of private speech generally must be viewpoint neutral, the government is subject to no such requirement when it engages in speech of its own. But the line between private expression and government speech is often fuzzy. To draw this distinction, the Supreme Court has placed increasing emphasis on whether members of the public reasonably perceive the relevant expression to be private or government speech. We think this turn toward public perception is a welcome development: government intervention in the marketplace of ideas is especially dangerous when it is nontransparent, so before allowing government officials to escape the viewpoint-neutrality requirement, courts should verify that the public actually perceives the speech in question to emanate from the government. But the Court has so far failed to develop a reliable method for determining how ordinary citizens distinguish between private and government messages, relying instead on armchair speculation. Meanwhile, scholars have not yet mustered any evidence as to when and why individuals understand messages to be private expression or government speech. To begin to fill this empirical void, we presented a variety of speech scenarios to a nationally representative sample of more than 1200 respondents and asked the respondents to assess whether the speech in question was the government’s. Some of the speculative claims made by the justices in recent government speech cases are borne out by our survey, but others prove less accurate. We further find that respondents are somewhat more likely to attribute messages to the government if they agree with those messages themselves; in this respect, lay people may be little different from judges, whose decisions in government speech cases sometimes seem to be influenced by ideology. We end by considering whether courts should consult survey evidence in resolving cases that involve government speech claims. An advantage of survey experiments is that they can be used to disentangle the effects of medium from the effects of message, reducing the risk that government speech doctrine will systematically favor some messages over others. To be sure, the use of survey evidence raises a number of implementation issues that require careful thought, but we ultimately conclude that an empirically informed government speech doctrine would protect First Amendment values more successfully than a doctrine dependent upon judicial guesswork.

中文翻译：

---

公众对政府演讲的看法

最高法院对出于第一修正案目的的私人言论和政府言论给予截然不同的待遇。虽然对私人言论的监管通常必须是观点中立的，但政府在进行自己的言论时不受这种要求的约束。但私人表达和政府言论之间的界限往往是模糊的。为了区分这一点，最高法院越来越重视公众是否合理地将相关表达视为私人或政府言论。我们认为这种向公众认知的转变是一个受欢迎的发展：政府对思想市场的干预在不透明时尤其危险，因此在允许政府官员逃避观点中立要求之前，法院应核实公众实际上认为有关言论是来自政府。但迄今为止，法院未能开发出一种可靠的方法来确定普通公民如何区分私人信息和政府信息，而是依靠扶手椅推测。与此同时，学者们还没有收集任何证据证明个人何时以及为何将信息理解为私人表达或政府言论。为了开始填补这一经验空白，我们向全国 1200 多名受访者的代表性样本展示了各种演讲场景，并要求受访者评估所讨论的演讲是否是政府的演讲。我们的调查证实了法官在最近的政府演讲案件中提出的一些推测性主张，但其他一些则证明不太准确。我们进一步发现，如果受访者本人同意这些信息，他们更有可能将信息归因于政府；在这方面，外行可能与法官几乎没有什么不同，法官在政府演讲案件中的决定有时似乎受到意识形态的影响。我们最后考虑法院在解决涉及政府言论主张的案件中是否应该参考调查证据。调查实验的一个优点是它们可以用来将媒介的影响与信息的影响分开，降低政府言论学说系统地偏爱某些信息而不是其他信息的风险。可以肯定的是，调查证据的使用提出了一些需要仔细考虑的实施问题，