Revista de Ciências Políticas e Assuntos Públicos
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Information, Partisanship, and Public Support for Health Insurance Requirements in the United States

David Wilson

We ask whether including information about the level of government and policy actor involved affects public opinion on health insurance requirements. To answer this question, we examine data from a question wording experiment embedded in a nationally representative telephone survey (n=906) that randomized whether a health insurance requirement was presented as a federal or state requirement and as being signed by a specific leader (President Barack Obama for the federal requirement or former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney for the state requirement). For the sample as a whole we found no statistically significant differences in support across the different versions, suggesting that the state/federal distinction may be unimportant to citizens. We also found that associating Obama with the federal requirement moved opinion among Democrats whereas ass