The Effects of Prestige Names in Question Wording

Although survey researchers are often warned against using prestige names in questions (e.g., identifying Contra aid as “President Reagan's policy”), prestige names are still commonly used. To learn more about the effects of using prestige names, we analyze two sets of experiments—on judicial confirmation elections and on an initiative on tax indexing. The results indicate that prestige names do more than shift responses in one direction— they eliminate the effect of education on DKs and provide more of a political basis for the responses.