ABSTRACT

There are many things that make Donald Trump a controversial figure in American politics, not least of which is his prominent and unorthodox use of Twitter to attack his opponents. The federal judiciary is a frequent target of the president’s ire: during his campaign and tenure as president, Trump has not hid his disdain for federal judges who disagree with him, and has on occasion taken to Twitter to express these feelings. This unprecedented form of going public provides the opportunity to shed light on the malleability of support for politically insulated institutions. We evaluate the hypothesis that Trump’s statements erode specific and diffuse support for the federal judiciary using a survey experiment in which real tweets written by the president are manipulated as the experimental treatment. We find that specifice, but not diffuse, support for the Court changes in response to his attacks, but those changes are conditioned on respondents' preexisting support for democratic values.

摘要

许多因素使唐纳德·特朗普成为美国政治上有争议的人物，其中最重要的就是他对Twitter的明显和非正统的使用来攻击他的对手。联邦司法机构经常是总统s恼的目标：在竞选总统期间和总统任职期间，特朗普并未掩饰对不同意他的联邦法官的不屑，并偶尔去推特上表达这些感受。这种前所未有的公开发行形式提供了机会，可以阐明对政治上孤立的机构的支持的可塑性。我们使用一项调查实验来评估特朗普的声明侵蚀了对联邦司法机构的特定和分散支持的假设，在该实验中，总统撰写的真实推文被作为实验方法来处理。我们发现了这种规格，但没有散布，