Politics of Food: An Experiment on Trust in Expert Regulation and Economic Costs of Political Polarization

Abstract

Rising political polarization heightens concerns about politicization of regulatory agencies, prompting a reassessment of the trade-off between accountability and independence. Perceived out-group partisan oversight can erode trust in regulation and impact key markets like food and medicine—a dynamic we investigate empirically. First, we demonstrate the salience of the president-regulatory agency link in US media using TV transcript data. Second, in a pre-registered field experiment with 5,566 individuals, we test the channel using a case where both the Trump and Biden EPAs endorsed antibiotic spraying on citrus crops. This enabled us to randomize the partisanship of the administration, holding the scientific arguments constant. Out-group administration reduces support for spraying by 26%, lowers trust in the EPA’s evaluation, and raises donations to an opposing NGO by 15%. We find no effect on willingness to pay for citrus products on average, measured in an obfuscated follow-up. However, we document significant differences in effects for habitual and occasional consumers. Taken together, there is a cost to increasing executive dependence of agencies—it reduces out-party supporters’ trust and influences economic behavior, though distrust may not lower demand.