Personal experience with policy matters: using natural experiment to estimate mere exposure effect

Abstract

Can simply living through a policy shape how people think about the policy? While existingscholarship often treats personal experience as secondary or contingent, we argue that livedpolicy experience can exert a direct and independent causal effect on policy attitudes. Drawingon mere exposure theory, we conceptualize personal experience as a distinct mechanism ofattitude formation and leverage a natural experiment based on recurring changes in the lengthof basic schooling in the Czech Republic to identify its causal impact. Because assignment to8- versus 9-year basic school was determined by birth cohort and policy timing rather than individualchoice, we can isolate the effect of lived policy experience from confounding selectionprocesses. We find that individuals who experienced a 9-year basic school policy regime exhibitsubstantially higher opposition to its abolition than those who attended an 8-year basic school.This treatment effect persists robustly after accounting for political ideology, parental status,educational attainment, and other covariates. Contrary to expectations, the treatment effectdoes not diminish over time nor vary by political sophistication. These findings suggest that thelived experience with policy can have a robust and lasting impact on policy attitudes, independentof symbolic or ideological factors. We discuss implications for policy theory and callfor greater attention to personal experience in both empirical research and theory development.