Public Perceptions of Government Speech

46 Pages Posted: 20 Dec 2017 Last revised: 2 Jul 2018

See all articles by Daniel J. Hemel

Daniel J. Hemel

New York University School of Law

Lisa Larrimore Ouellette

Stanford Law School

Date Written: December 18, 2017

Abstract

The Supreme Court accords starkly different treatment to private expression and government speech for First Amendment purposes. While regulation of private speech generally must be viewpoint neutral, the government is subject to no such requirement when it engages in speech of its own. But the line between private expression and government speech is often fuzzy. To draw this distinction, the Supreme Court has placed increasing emphasis on whether members of the public reasonably perceive the relevant expression to be private or government speech. We think this turn toward public perception is a welcome development: government intervention in the marketplace of ideas is especially dangerous when it is nontransparent, so before allowing government officials to escape the viewpoint-neutrality requirement, courts should verify that the public actually perceives the speech in question to emanate from the government. But the Court has so far failed to develop a reliable method for determining how ordinary citizens distinguish between private and government messages, relying instead on armchair speculation. Meanwhile, scholars have not yet mustered any evidence as to when and why individuals understand messages to be private expression or government speech.

To begin to fill this empirical void, we presented a variety of speech scenarios to a nationally representative sample of more than 1200 respondents and asked the respondents to assess whether the speech in question was the government’s. Some of the speculative claims made by the justices in recent government speech cases are borne out by our survey, but others prove less accurate. We further find that respondents are somewhat more likely to attribute messages to the government if they agree with those messages themselves; in this respect, lay people may be little different from judges, whose decisions in government speech cases sometimes seem to be influenced by ideology. We end by considering whether courts should consult survey evidence in resolving cases that involve government speech claims. An advantage of survey experiments is that they can be used to disentangle the effects of medium from the effects of message, reducing the risk that government speech doctrine will systematically favor some messages over others. To be sure, the use of survey evidence raises a number of implementation issues that require careful thought, but we ultimately conclude that an empirically informed government speech doctrine would protect First Amendment values more successfully than a doctrine dependent upon judicial guesswork.

Keywords: First Amendment, Free Speech, Government Speech, Public Perception, Survey Experiment

JEL Classification: K1, K19, K38

Suggested Citation

Hemel, Daniel J. and Ouellette, Lisa Larrimore, Public Perceptions of Government Speech (December 18, 2017). Supreme Court Review, Vol. 2017, p. 33, 2018, Stanford Public Law Working Paper, U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 668, University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper No. 851, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3090392

Daniel J. Hemel (Contact Author)

New York University School of Law ( email )

40 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012-1099
United States

HOME PAGE: http://rb.gy/j5afjp

Lisa Larrimore Ouellette

Stanford Law School ( email )

559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305
United States

HOME PAGE: http://law.stanford.edu/directory/lisa-larrimore-ouellette/

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