Abstract Can simply living through a policy shape how people think about the policy? While existing scholarship often treats personal experience as secondary or contingent, we argue that lived policy experience can exert a direct and independent causal effect on policy attitudes. Drawing on mere exposure theory, we conceptualize personal experience as a distinct mechanism of attitude formation and leverage a natural experiment based on recurring changes in the length of basic schooling in the Czech Republic to identify its causal impact. Because assignment to 8- versus 9-year basic school was determined by birth cohort and policy timing rather than individual choice, we can isolate the effect of lived policy experience from confounding selection processes. We find that individuals who experienced a 9-year basic school policy regime exhibit substantially 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 effect does not diminish over time nor vary by political sophistication. These findings suggest that the lived experience with policy can have a robust and lasting impact on policy attitudes, independent of symbolic or ideological factors. We discuss implications for policy theory and call for greater attention to personal experience in both empirical research and theory development.
Veselý et al. (Fri,) studied this question.