FIND DATA: By Author | Journal | Sites   ANALYZE DATA: Help with R | SPSS | Stata | Excel   WHAT'S NEW? US Politics | Int'l Relations | Law & Courts
   FIND DATA: By Author | Journal | Sites   WHAT'S NEW? US Politics | IR | Law & Courts
If this link is broken, please report as broken. You can also submit updates (will be reviewed).
Facts Didn’t Move Voters: Partisanship Locked Support for Trump’s Acquittal
Insights from the Field
impeachment
public opinion
partisanship
civic knowledge
survey experiment
American Politics
PS
2 Stata files
1 datasets
1 text files
Dataverse
Public Approval, Policy Issues, and Partisanship in the American Presidency: Examining the 2020 Trump Impeachment and Acquittal was authored by Craig Burnett and Meena Bose. It was published by Cambridge in PS in 2022.

Building on scholarship about public opinion and democratic governance, this study uses a unique survey to test whether factual information about President Trump’s 2019–2020 impeachment influenced public attitudes.

📊 How the survey tested whether facts change minds

A sample was split into two groups. One half answered three factual questions about Trump’s first impeachment trial. The other half received the same three facts as an informational treatment in a quasi-experiment designed to try to shift their views of the trial.

📈 What the experiment found

  • Support for acquittal was largely static despite exposure to factual information.
  • Partisanship strongly shaped whether respondents accepted the veracity and importance of the presented political information.
  • Civic knowledge—measured via the factual questions—appears to have a limited, and perhaps even nonexistent, effect on public attitudes about American politics.

🧾 Key design details

  • Focus: President Trump’s first impeachment (2019–2020 hearings and trial).
  • Method: A unique split-sample survey with a quasi-experimental informational treatment using three factual items.

🧐 Why it matters

These results suggest that simply providing factual information may not alter partisan-aligned judgments about high-profile political events. The findings have implications for theories of democratic responsiveness and for efforts to use civic knowledge to improve public deliberation and accountability.

data
Find on Google Scholar
Find on JSTOR
Find on CUP
PS: Political Science & Politics
Podcast host Ryan