The Power of a Tweet? Social Media, Presidential Communication, and the Politics of Health Academic Article

abstract

• AbstractSocial media holds the potential to transform presidential communication and leadership. We test whether presidential tweets affect public opinions about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as well as partisan reputations for handling health policy using a surveybased experiment. We find that negative tweets about the ACA from President Trump reduced favorability toward the ACA among Republicans and increased the partisan gap. Support was particularly reduced among Republicans with low levels of racial resentment, with a corresponding opposite effect among Democrats with high levels of racial resentment. We found only limited effects on opinions about party handling of health policy more generally.

authors

• Haeder, Simon

published proceedings

• PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY

altmetric score

• 10.05

author list (cited authors)

• Haeder, S. F., & Chattopadhyay, J.

citation count

• 1

complete list of authors

• Haeder, Simon F||Chattopadhyay, Jacqueline

publication date

• June 2022

publisher

• Wiley  Publisher

published in

• Presidential Studies Quarterly  Journal

keywords

• Health Policy
• Health Reform
• President
• Presidential Communication
• Presidential Leadership
• Social Media

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

• 10.1111/psq.12780

start page

• 436

end page

• 473

volume

• 52

issue

• 2

URL

• http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/psq.12780