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Same Facts, Different Interpretations: Partisan Motivation and Opinion on Iraq
Abstract
Scholars assume that citizens perform better when they know pertinent facts. Factual beliefs, however, become relevant for political judgments only when people interpret them. Interpretations provide opportunities for partisans to rationalize their existing opinions. Using panel studies, we examine whether and how partisans updated factual beliefs, interpretations of beliefs, and opinions about the handling of the Iraq war as real-world conditions changed. Most respondents held similar, fairly accurate beliefs about facts. But interpretations varied across partisan groups in predictable ways. In turn, interpretations, not beliefs, drove opinions. Perversely, the better informed more effectively used interpretations to buttress their existing partisan views.
... Even in advanced democracies, citizens are typically too uninterested in politics to form coherent political views (Berelson et al., 1954;Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2002). Furthermore, citizens often follow their partisan identities uncritically, even on issues in which their party positions clash with their "objective" interests (Gaines et al., 2007;Goodman, 2022;Kahan, 2013;Milton & Taber, 2013;Nyhan & Reifler, 2010;Taber & Lodge, 2006). ...
... Citizens tend to be uninformed about public affairs (Carpini et al., 1996;Converse, 1990;Galston, 2001) and are happy to delegate political decisionmaking to experts and political elites (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2002, although see; Rapeli, 2016;VanderMolen, 2017 for evidence challenging these findings). Furthermore, citizens are prone to cognitive biases, such as partisan motivated reasoning, that lead to misperceptions about politics (Gaines et al., 2007;Kahan, 2013;Kuklinski et al., 2000;Nyhan & Reifler, 2010;Taber & Lodge, 2006). From this perspective, citizens judge whether specific institutions meet democratic standards based on the extent to which they benefit their partisan or ideological interests (Graham & Svolik, 2020;Kingzette et al., 2021;Krishnarajan, 2022). ...
... Furthermore, in line with recent studies on support for democratic norms (Goodman, 2022;Graham & Svolik, 2020;Kingzette et al., 2021) and with the vast literature on partisan motivated reasoning (Gaines et al., 2007;Goodman, 2022;Kahan, 2013;Milton & Taber, 2013;Nyhan & Reifler, 2010;Taber & Lodge, 2006), our analyses also show that partisanship and ideology play a role in shaping democratic evaluations. However, political resources tend to be associated with more nuanced evaluations of democracy among partisans from both sides of the political spectrum. ...
This article examines how cognitive resources such as internal efficacy and
political knowledge relate to citizens’ ability to evaluate democratic institutions.
Using original survey data from the United States (N = 1093), we find,
first, that internal efficacy is associated with more positive assessments of
democratic institutions in general. Conversely, political knowledge is associated
with more discriminating assessments of specific institutions. Third,
political knowledge moderates the positive impact of internal efficacy.
Finally, while partisan and ideological reasoning are present in citizens’
evaluations of democracy, greater political knowledge is associated with
more nuanced assessments of democratic institutions across parties and
ideological orientations. These results suggest that increasing cognitive
resources can contribute to the development of critical citizens capable of
identifying undemocratic features of their political systems.
... While the existing literature has focused on how "winners" and "losers" systematically differ with respect to postelection attitudes (Anderson et al. 2005), this study seeks to understand how these perceptions are formed. In line with previous studies on public opinion formation, this research argues that voters can perceive the same fact-in this particular case, the results of an election-and still make different judgments about its meaning (Gaines et al. 2007). Prior studies have explored misperceptions' pervasiveness and the factors that contribute to them in advanced industrial democracies (Nyhan and Refiler 2010;Miller, Saunders, and Farhart 2016). ...
... This means that voters do update their beliefs, but the process is biased by partisan motivations: voters protect their in-group by choosing interpretations that rationalize their partisan beliefs, failing to consider that their partisan team might have lost the elections. Moreover, partisan-motivated reasoning affects voters' interpretations of factual information (Gaines et al. 2007), altering voters' perceptions of election integrity and, consequently, making them more prone to view the elections as fraudulent. This behavior has no instrumental benefits; rather, it is based on expressive benefits rooted in partisanship. ...
... Regardless of the specific issue, these studies show that facts or events do not speak for themselves; people must still interpret them (Gaines et al. 2007;Castro Cornejo 2023a), leading voters to interpret those facts and their implications differently. When directional motivations are more salient (e.g., accusations of election fraud in a polarized party system like Mexico), respondents are likely to process information in a manner that is consistent with their partisan preference rather than maximizing accuracy (Flynn, Nyhan and Reifler 2017;Taber and Lodge 2006). ...
Why do some voters believe that there is electoral fraud when this belief contradicts the best available evidence? While the literature on public opinion has explored misperceptions’ pervasiveness and the factors that contribute to them in advanced industrial democracies, the present study analyzes motivated reasoning among voters in a young democracy, Mexico. This study highlights the important role that partisanship plays in voters’ likelihood to believe the allegations of electoral fraud in the 2006 presidential election in Mexico, which continues polarizing both political elites and the electorate even today. To understand the mechanisms at work, this research finds that it is not voters lacking information but rather voters with high levels of affective polarization and conspiratorial thinking who are more likely to believe that there was electoral fraud. The study also includes a survey experiment that fact-checked the belief in the alleged electoral fraud. Consistent with motivated reasoning theory, MORENA partisans resisted efforts to reduce their misperception. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the conditions that make some voters hold misperceptions in young democracies.
... Research in political science indeed supports the idea that ideological commitments are an important and stable aspect of identity that limits the malleability of political views (Bartels, 2002;Green et al., 2004). Even objective facts and professional political campaigns may have little persuasive effect (Gaines et al., 2007;Kahan, 2023;Kalla & Broockman, 2017). As a result, activists and political campaigns often put less emphasis on framing issues and shaping public opinion-the subject of Chatterji and Toffel (2019)-than on mobilizing existing co-partisans and increasing the prominence of their concerns on the political agenda (Holbrook & McClurg, 2005;Kingdon, 1995;Panagopoulos, 2016). ...
... Chatterji and Toffel (2019) find that CEOs are as effective as, but not more effective than, other speakers at changing people's beliefs on controversial issues. However, changing opinions is difficult (Gaines et al., 2007;Jerit & Barabas, 2012;Taber & Lodge, 2006). Therefore, some political activists frequently prioritize mobilizing co-partisans to participate in politics over trying to change people's minds. ...
CEOs increasingly engage in activism on issues such as gun control, voting rights, and abortion. Although such activism may benefit their firms, the stated goal is often to mobilize the public and precipitate change. In an experiment with 4,578 respondents, we study the effect of CEO activism on people’s willingness to contact their U.S. senators about abortion. On average, showing a CEO message supporting abortion rights is not more effective at mobilizing pro-choice citizens than showing no message or showing a message from other speakers. Additionally, CEOs do not provoke countermobilization by people who oppose abortion. We explore heterogeneous treatment effects and find that CEO activism is better at motivating pro-choice citizens to engage in politics when their senators are Democrats and thus likely receptive to pro-choice activism, consistent with stakeholder alignment theory. Our findings contribute to research on leadership ethics and democracy by examining the ability of CEOs and organizations to foster engagement in the democratic process.
... This set of beliefs constitutes a "dynamic force" shaping citizens' reactions and perceptions to political issues (Bartels, 2002). The more information individuals have, the more likely they are to interpret this information in ways that reinforce their partisan views (Gaines et al., 2007) and find instrumental benefits in courses of action aligned with their personal convictions (Higgins & Molden, 2003). In this context, factual reality is misused to reinforce existing values and cognitions (Gaines et al., 2007). ...
... The more information individuals have, the more likely they are to interpret this information in ways that reinforce their partisan views (Gaines et al., 2007) and find instrumental benefits in courses of action aligned with their personal convictions (Higgins & Molden, 2003). In this context, factual reality is misused to reinforce existing values and cognitions (Gaines et al., 2007). ...
Drawing on the upper echelons theory and the attention theory, this study investigates the influence of a CEO’s political beliefs on the market value generated by corporate social responsibility investments. The empirical analysis on U.S. hotel companies over a 25-year period (1998–2022) reveals that greater misalignment between a CEO’s ideology and the national political climate leads to a weaker impact of corporate social responsibility-related activities on the market value. This result is significant because it suggests that CEOs’ actions are not solely determined by their ideological stance—as the upper echelons theory predicts—but rather by the conflict they experience when the external environment contradicts their ideological beliefs, which is a theoretical extension.
... For example, when economic conditions are so bad that citizens converge in acknowledging this, they simply polarise over who to blame for the conditions (Bisgaard, 2015(Bisgaard, , 2019; when partisans converge in their perception of economic indicators such as the stock market, they polarise over whether such indicators measure the true health of the economy in ways that cast their party in a favourable light (Anson, 2017); and when forced to acknowledge bad actions by their party's leaders, they recall putatively worse actions by rival party leaders in ways that present their own leader as the "lesser of two evils" (Groenendyk, 2013). In an especially striking example of this phenomenon, when a sample of Democrat and Republican voters during the Iraq war converged in their assessment of the number of American casualties and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, they polarised both in how they interpreted such numbers (i.e., as "high" or "low") and in their explanation of why such weapons were not found in ways that were favourable to their respective parties (Gaines, et al., 2007). Such strategies, whereby partisans acknowledge the same facts but interpret and contextualise such facts in ways that vindicate their party's superiority over rival parties, are ubiquitous (Krishnarajan, 2022;Malka & Adelman, 2022) Now consider a purely non-motivational theory of partisan cognition. ...
... The most successful press secretaries can present largely accurate information if they are skilled at combining, framing, and filtering that information in ways that support pre-determined conclusions, and the same lesson generalises to partisan cognition: citizens can function as savvy partisan press secretaries-and so can be highly biased and polarised in their interpretations of reality-even if the number of demonstrably inaccurate beliefs that they hold is small, and even if they are highly responsive to evidence. Given this, political scientists should move beyond the focus on misperceptions and misinformation as the sole consequences of partisan motivated cogni-tion and explore the many subtler ways in which party allegiances can bias political thought (see Bisgaard, 2019;Gaines, et al., 2007;Malka and Adelman, 2022). ...
A large body of research in political science claims that the way in which democratic citizens think about politics is motivationally biased by partisanship. Numerous critics argue that the evidence for this claim is better explained by theories in which party allegiances influence political cognition without motivating citizens to embrace biased beliefs. This article has three aims. First, I clarify this criticism, explain why common responses to it are unsuccessful, and argue that to make progress on this debate we need a more developed theory of the connections between group attachments and motivated reasoning. Second, I develop such a theory. Drawing on research on coalitional psychology and the social functions of beliefs, I argue that partisanship unconsciously biases cognition by generating motivations to advocate for party interests, which transform individuals into partisan press secretaries. Finally, I argue that this theory offers a superior explanation of a wide range of relevant findings than purely non-motivational theories of political cognition.
... Sexism is likely to predispose the belief in sexually biased misinformation. The theory of motivated reasoning states that people are rarely objective in evaluating information but more eager to accept belief-congruent information and more critical toward belief-incongruent information (Gaines et al., 2007;Swire et al., 2017;Taber & Lodge, 2006;Weeks, 2015). Previous studies show consistent results on motivated reasoning across topics ranging from affirmative action, gun control, free speech, and illegal immigration to racial discrimination (Taber & Lodge, 2006;Weeks, 2015). ...
We explore the link between social media news consumption and belief in misinformation about women politicians in India. In addition, we investigate the roles of sexism, with cognitive ability (individual factor) and gender inequality status (of the state where respondents reside) as structural-level moderating factors. Results indicate a positive association between social media news use and belief in misinformation, mediated by hostile and benevolent sexism. Furthermore, we find that low-cognitive individuals in states with high structural gender inequality are most vulnerable to misinformation. The results emphasize the need to create more gender equality structurally, to reduce susceptibility to gendered misinformation.
... In democratic contexts, cognitive processes, especially motivated reasoning-largely driven by partisanship and ideology-have been the primary framework used to explain selective exposure (Kunda 1990;Lodge and Taber 2013;Schulte-Cloos and Anghel 2023;Wojcieszak et al. 2019). Ample evidence indicates that partisanship activates various cognitive processes, notably politically motivated reasoning (PMR), leading individuals to interpret information in ways that align with their political beliefs (Chinn and Pasek 2021;Gaines et al. 2007;Vegetti and Mancosu 2020). Within the broader scope of PMR, other cognitive processes, such as confirmation bias, play essential roles in processing information, prompting partisans to selectively accept information that conforms to their existing beliefs while rejecting contradictory information (Taber and Lodge 2006). ...
Misinformation poses a significant threat to the integrity of political systems, particularly in competitive authoritarian regimes (CARs), where it can distort public perception and undermine democratic processes. This study focuses on the 2023 Turkish general elections—a context characterized by widespread misinformation. While extensive research has been conducted on misinformation in democratic systems, where press freedom and digitalization foster a mix of reliable and misleading information, this investigation targets the unique challenges and media consumption patterns in CARs. Utilizing a nationally representative survey after the 2023 elections, we examine the association between media consumption (traditional and online) and susceptibility to misinformation among government and opposition voters. Our findings reveal that partisan news consumption significantly influences belief in misinformation, with individuals tending to believe claims aligning with their political affiliations while rejecting opposing claims. Moreover, television remains a dominant source of information in Turkey, unlike social media, which shows a limited impact on misinformation beliefs but possesses a conditional corrective potential for certain electorate segments. This study underscores the enduring influence of traditional media in CARs and suggests that while the theory of selective exposure and partisanship is applicable, the constrained information environment significantly shapes public perceptions and misinformation dynamics.
... While there is some evidence that political worldview (i.e., a person's compendium of prior beliefs, ideological commitments, and partisan identity) can influence the efficacy of a corrective fact-check (Ecker & Ang, 2019;Nyhan & Reifler, 2010; also see Gaines et al., 2007;Taber & Lodge, 2006;Weeks, 2015), subsequent research has failed to replicate these results (Ecker et al., 2021;Wood & Porter, 2019). Additionally, several papers have shown that fact-checking claims from politicians leads both supporters and nonsupporters of those politicians to update their beliefs (Aird et al., 2018;Nyhan et al., 2020;Swire, Berinsky, et al., 2017;Swire-Thompson et al., 2020). ...
Making misleading statements may benefit a politician, for example, during an election campaign. However, there are potentially also negative consequences; political misinformation can taint democratic debate, voters may be misled into forming false beliefs, and being fact‐checked may damage a politician's reputation. Previous research has found that correcting misleading statements made by established politicians reduces topical misperceptions, but hardly affects voter feelings and support. Here, we examined the impact of political misinformation and fact‐checking when politicians are unfamiliar. Participants ( N = 406) were engaged in a simulated election campaign set in an unfamiliar country, featuring statements from fictional candidates. Participants indicated their feelings toward the candidates, cast a vote, and rated their belief in the fact‐checked statements. Misleading statements that were not corrected positively affected feelings toward and voting for (right‐leaning) politicians. Corrective fact‐checks had large effects, reducing belief in misinformation, and fact‐checked candidates were viewed much less favorably and attracted far fewer votes. This demonstrates that in the absence of strong pre‐existing attitudes, corrective fact‐checks can negatively impact misinformation‐spreading politicians who are not (yet) well known.
... The literature in political science shows that partisans have both confirmation bias (bias for the information that is consistent with their political leanings) and disconfirmation bias (bias against disconfirming information) (Taber & Lodge, 2006). Therefore, the biased information processing may cause individuals with different partisan preferences to view the same information differently (Gaines et al., 2007;Jerit & Barabas, 2012;Shapiro & Bloch-Elkon, 2008). The impact of partisan biases also extends to financial markets, influencing financial decision-making processes (Kempf et al., 2021). ...
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigate whether the U.S. partisan gap over the crisis affected how firms communicated its impact to investors. Specifically, we analyze the effect of executives’ political leanings on their firms’ qualitative disclosures regarding the pandemic. We find that firms led by Republican-leaning executives provided fewer COVID-related disclosures in quarterly financial reports and used language with a more positive tone compared to firms led by Democratic-leaning executives. Furthermore, the partisan effect on both the amount and tone of COVID disclosures was more pronounced when the Republican party held the U.S. presidency, consistent with the prediction of partisanship alignment theory. We also show that the market reacted more strongly to the tone of COVID disclosures from Republican-leaning executives. Our research provides valuable insights for investors and policymakers into the substantial influence of executives’ political ideology on corporate communications, particularly in the context of today’s increasingly polarized political environment and growing global political tensions.
Keywords: Political leanings; COVID-19; Corporate disclosures; Linguistic tone; 10-Qs
JEL: G41, M41, P16
... Thus, promise fulfillment may hinge on what information voters have and use to make decisions. However, voters view and interact with information differently based on their prior beliefs and partisan leanings (e.g., Carsey and Layman 2006;Gaines et al. 2007;Gunther et al. 2012). It is clear that partisan affiliation has increased in intensity (Druckman, Peterson, and Slothuus 2013;Rothschild et al. 2019) and with increased salience as an identity (Mason 2015;. ...
I draw together theories of partisan polarization and motivated reasoning, which suggest that partisanship shapes information processing, and theories of accountability, which argue voters hold elected officials accountable through promise fulfillment. Here, I ask how partisanship influences voter understanding of promise fulfillment and accountability and if voters assess promises through a partisan lens. Two original survey experiments test how respondents react to promise fulfillment on the issues of immigration and human trafficking. I demonstrate that co-partisans differentiate between kept and broken promises, but out-partisans do not. Despite partisan differences, respondents evaluate promise-keeping when asked about accountability but not when asked about approval. Thus, even when voters recognize broken promises, accountability is influenced by partisanship. Immigration, a more polarized issue, is more likely to prime a partisan response than human trafficking, a less polarized issue. Future work must account for partisanship in accountability and what this means for our understanding of fundamental democratic principles.
... When faced with uncomfortable and undeniable facts about reality, there remain a number of possible options for engaging in motivated reasoning (Gaines et al., 2007). One of these options is selective attribution. ...
Accountability relies on voters accurately evaluating government performance in addressing the important issues of the day. This requirement arguably applies to an even greater extent when addressing fundamental societal crises. However, partisanship can bias evaluations, with government partisans perceiving outcomes more favorably, or attributing less responsibility for bad outcomes. We examine partisan motivated reasoning in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, using panel data and a survey experiment of over 6000 respondents in which vignettes prime respondents about the UK government’s successes and failures in tackling the pandemic. We also propose a novel extension of the partisan bias thesis: partisans arrive at biased judgements of government competence by recalling the past performance of the government differently, according to whether or not their favored party held power at that time. We find that even in the relatively consensual partisan context of the UK’s response to Covid-19, where both major parties endorsed both lockdown and vaccination programs, there is evidence of both current and recall partisan biases: Opposition partisans are more likely to blame the government for negative outcomes and less likely to recall positive aspects of the government’s recent and past performance unless prompted to do so. Our findings have implications for understanding the limits of democratic accountability under crisis conditions.
... The theory of "motivated reasoning" (Kraft, Lodge and Taber, 2015;Hartman and Newmark, 2012;Taber and Lodge, 2006) suggests a more nuanced information processing to establish sympathy toward Israelis or Palestinians. People might employ one-sided shortcuts to confirm their prior beliefs (Kertzer, Rathbun and Rathbun, 2020) or screen information in ways that systematically favor their preferred group (Bullock and Lenz, 2019;Gaines et al., 2007). ...
... Na perspectiva da identidade social do partidarismo (e.g., Green;Palmquist;Schickler, 2002;Mason 2018), portanto, o petismo é a fonte de sentimentos intrapartidários e de construção afetiva junto ao PT. A conexão psicológica ao partido, por exemplo, faz com que os partidários evitem e desconsiderem informações negativas ou racionalizem a interpretação do contexto político para serem consistentes com a sua identidade (i.e., Bartels, 2002;Gaines et al., 2007). Logo, os sentimentos intrapartidários, quando identificados em altas taxas, informam em que medida os partidos servem de atalhos cognitivos e heurísticas afetivas para a preferência de seu eleitorado. ...
Estudos sobre eleitores partidários no Brasil mostram o declínio do partidarismo e dos sentimentos em relação aos partidos. Como a identidade partidária se mantém nesse cenário político? Argumentamos que, mesmo quando não avaliam bem o próprio partido, a identificação partidária se sustenta por meio dos sentimentos interpartidários, que se deterioram ao longo dos anos no país. A partir de dados do Estudo Eleitoral Brasileiro (ESEB) entre 2002 e 2018, os dados sugerem que os partidários estão menos entusiasmados com os partidos brasileiros e a relação entre sentimentos partidários se acentuou no contexto eleitoral mais recente. Os resultados da relação entre sentimentos partidários, utilizando um termo quadrático, indicam que as principais alternativas ao petismo justificam uma identidade partidária essencialmente na estratégia do menor dos males: a maior deterioração da imagem dos oponentes políticos como um mecanismo de justificativa da ambivalência em relação ao próprio partidarismo.
... Partisanship can influence opinions 50 , shape policy preferences 51,52 , distort interpretation of political facts 53,54 , alter vision 32,55 and affect memory 56 . ...
Misinformation harms society by affecting citizens' beliefs and behaviour. Recent research has shown that partisanship and cognitive reflection (i.e. engaging in analytical thinking) play key roles in the acceptance of misinformation. However, the relative importance of these factors remains a topic of ongoing debate. In this registered study, we tested four hypotheses on the relationship between each factor and the belief in statements made by Argentine politicians. Participants (N = 1353) classified fact-checked political statements as true or false, completed a cognitive reflection test, and reported their voting preferences. Using Signal Detection Theory and Bayesian modeling, we found a reliable positive association between political concordance and overall belief in a statement (median = 0.663, CI95 = [0.640, 0.685]), a reliable positive association between cognitive reflection and scepticism (median = 0.039, CI95 = [0.006, 0.072]), a positive but unreliable association between cognitive reflection and truth discernment (median = 0.016, CI95 = [− 0.015, 0.046]) and a negative but unreliable association between cognitive reflection and partisan bias (median = − 0.016, CI95 = [− 0.037, 0.006]). Our results highlight the need to further investigate the relationship between cognitive reflection and partisanship in different contexts and formats.
Protocol registration
The stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 22 August 2022. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/EBRGC .
... Instead, they can counterargue, criticize the source, or selectively remember or encode countervailing information, which can provide justifications for their beliefs [22][23][24][25]. Even with similar or identical facts, partisans can come to different interpretations [26] or misattribute responsibility for facts to align beliefs with preferences [27]. Our argument brings institutional context more fully into the literature on motivated reasoning. ...
How does the public assess the Supreme Court and its work? Using data from three surveys conducted over a span of ten years, we show that individuals’ policy preferences drive evaluations of the Court and its willingness to reform the Court. We find strong evidence that the Court’s hybrid legal-political nature enables a unique form of policy-motivated reasoning: respondents who agree with Court outputs view the Court and its work as more “legal” in nature, while those who disagree view both as more “political.” Our findings stand in contrast to longstanding views in the literature that the public views the Court as a fundamentally different sort of institution that stands largely separate from politics. The fact that policy attitudes powerfully inform the public’s assessment of the Court has crucial implications for the ongoing debates over Supreme Court power.
... 2) Category 2: Interpretations of Facts: The second category involves questions about the contextual interpretations of facts, rendering them akin to opinions [50]. Complete algorithmic automation of verification in this category is impractical This article has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence. ...
The Generative Pre-trained Transformer
(GPT) models, renowned for generating human-like text, occasionally produce “hallucinations” - outputs that diverge from human expectations. Current mitigation strategies for these GPT hallucinations largely rely on algorithmic automation, thereby overlooking the complexities of human judgment and cultural influence, particularly in fact interpretation. Addressing this issue, we have introduced a Culturally Sensitive Test that integrates language subjectivity, cultural nuances, and GPT idiosyncrasies. We have applied this test to five GPT models—OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4, Google’s Bard, Perplexity AI and TruthGPT - evaluating their responses to 70 questions across seven categories designed to provoke hallucinations. The evaluated models demonstrated varying performance, with controversial topics, those lacking clear scientific consensus and the brain teasers proving more susceptible to GPT hallucinations. Our study has paved the way for a nuanced assessment of GPT hallucinations.
... A key finding in political behavior is that partisans are largely unable or unwilling to accurately perceive the objective conditions of the world and hold elites responsible for their policy failures that contributed to those conditions (e.g., Achen & Bartels, 2017;Bartels, 2002;Converse, 1964;Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1993;Gaines et al., 2007;Jerit et al., 2006;Nyhan & Reifler, 2010;Taber & Lodge, 2006). Instead, they engage in biased processing of objective conditions selecting and integrating new information in line with their partisan predilections (e.g., Kunda, 1990;Lenz, 2013;Taber & Lodge, 2006;Zaller, 1992). ...
Partisans have biased perceptions of objective conditions. At first glance, the COVID-19 pandemic would appear to be an example of this phenomenon. Noting that most citizens have consistently agreed about the pandemic, I argue that we have overlooked pre-political factors that are as influential as partisanship in shaping citizens’ responses to the pandemic. I identify one such construct in perceived vulnerability to infectious disease (PVD). In one cross-sectional study and one panel study, I find that the influence of PVD on citizens’ perceptions of COVID-19 equals that of partisanship. I also find that PVD can moderate the influence of partisanship on perceptions of harmfulness, nearly erasing the impact of being a Republican on perceiving COVID-19 as a threat. When led by PVD as well as partisanship to accurately perceive harm, citizens, including Republicans, attribute more responsibility to former president Donald Trump for his failed handling of the crisis.
... If partisan motivations are in opposition to accuracy goals, then voters are unlikely to meet even low standards for rational decision-making. Gaines, et al. (2007) show how interpretations of the same information create divergent beliefs on the Iraq war, which led to divergent opinions, with better informed citizens most likely to show this effect. Lebo and Cassino (2007) identify how partisan motivated reasoning has implications for presidential approval ratings; Kuru, Pasek, and Traugott (2017) show that motivated reasoning affects the perceived credibility of public opinion polls; Schaffner and Roche (2017) demonstrate how motivated reasoning affects the accuracy or perceptions of economic news. ...
This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and intergroup relations. Some chapters address the political psychology of political elites—their personality, motives, beliefs, and leadership styles, and their judgments, decisions, and actions in domestic policy, foreign policy, international conflict, and conflict resolution. Other chapters deal with the dynamics of mass political behavior: voting, collective action, the influence of political communications, political socialization and civic education, group-based political behavior, social justice, and the political incorporation of immigrants. Research discussed in the volume is fueled by a mix of age-old questions and recent world events.
... We know from earlier studies that many citizens wish to restrict statements about minority groups, religion, or national symbols (such as the national flag) because such statements inflict harm on particular identities (e.g., Wilhelm et al. (2020), Armstrong and Wronski (2019) and White and Crandall (2017)). As citizens interpret information in accordance with their political priors (Kunda, 1990;Gaines et al., 2007;Lodge and Taber, 2013;Tworzecki and Markowski, 2014;Shapiro and Bloch-Elkon, 2008), this willingness to restrict most likely differs across political values. Nevertheless, we still expect average effects to materialize regardless of the target group for these offensive statements. ...
... Previous empirical research has indeed found that partisans may evaluate the same political arguments and evidence differently, placing considerably more weight on those arguments that reinforce their priors while ignoring or criticizing counter-attitudinal information (Taber et al. 2009). Partisan motivated reasoning can also manifest itself in how individuals interpret or rationalize counter-attitudinal political information; for example, to defend their party in the face of unfavorable information, partisans may selectively attribute responsibility or downplay the importance of the issues or policies in question (Gaines et al. 2007;Tilley and Hobolt 2011;Bisgaard 2019). ...
How do people react to information that challenges their party’s policies? While most of the existing literature focuses on possible changes in issue opinions, we know less about other implicit and explicit ways people may contend with counter-attitudinal information. In an online experiment in India, I present participants with potentially incongruent information about a controversial economic policy and ask them to evaluate the quality of this information. I find that strong party supporters (non-supporters) feel that an article that criticizes (praises) the policy is of very poor quality. Further, people are much more likely to ignore the biased nature of an article if it reinforces their priors—but complain if it does not. Yet, although I observe strong affective reactions against information that is counter-attitudinal, there is no evidence of opinion backlash; instead, there is (weak) evidence of people updating in the direction of incongruent information. These findings reinforce the importance of studying reactions to counter-attitudinal information above and beyond issue-specific opinions.
An enormous body of literature argues that recommendation algorithms drive political polarization by creating “filter bubbles” and “rabbit holes.” Using four experiments with nearly 9,000 participants, we show that manipulating algorithmic recommendations to create these conditions has limited effects on opinions. Our experiments employ a custom-built video platform with a naturalistic, YouTube-like interface presenting real YouTube videos and recommendations. We experimentally manipulate YouTube’s actual recommendation algorithm to simulate filter bubbles and rabbit holes by presenting ideologically balanced and slanted choices. Our design allows us to intervene in a feedback loop that has confounded the study of algorithmic polarization—the complex interplay between supply of recommendations and user demand for content—to examine downstream effects on policy attitudes. We use over 130,000 experimentally manipulated recommendations and 31,000 platform interactions to estimate how recommendation algorithms alter users’ media consumption decisions and, indirectly, their political attitudes. Our results cast doubt on widely circulating theories of algorithmic polarization by showing that even heavy-handed (although short-term) perturbations of real-world recommendations have limited causal effects on policy attitudes. Given our inability to detect consistent evidence for algorithmic effects, we argue the burden of proof for claims about algorithm-induced polarization has shifted. Our methodology, which captures and modifies the output of real-world recommendation algorithms, offers a path forward for future investigations of black-box artificial intelligence systems. Our findings reveal practical limits to effect sizes that are feasibly detectable in academic experiments.
Extant research has examined nation brand and country image as key variables that affect attitudes and behaviors toward a country. Meanwhile, there is scarce research on how individuals' observations and experiences of bilateral issues affect their reactions toward the country involved. Based on current research on coping and problem solving, this study tests a framework that examines the cognitive processes that individuals undergo to make problem recognitions and blame attributions for two bilateral issues that involve the same country and their effects on negative sentiment and negative megaphoning about the country. To investigate this, this study uses an online survey conducted with a nationally representative sample of 509 South Korean citizens in relation to two issues allegedly caused by China: yellow dust and coronavirus. The findings showed that individuals who reported high problem recognition about yellow dust also reported high problem recognition about coronavirus. Their problem recognitions led to blame attributions toward China's role in causing them. Chain effects were found as problem recognition and blame attribution about one issue was positively related to the other. Subsequently, blame attributions for the two issues were found to be positively associated with negative sentiment and negative megaphoning about China.
We review an empirical literature that studies how political polarization affects financial decisions. We first discuss the degree of partisan segregation in finance and corporate America, the mechanisms through which partisanship may influence financial decisions, and the available data sources used to infer individuals’ partisan leanings. We then describe and discuss the empirical evidence. Our review suggests an economically large and often growing partisan gap in the financial decisions of households, corporate executives, and financial intermediaries. Partisan alignment between individuals explains team and financial relationship formation, with initial evidence suggesting that high levels of partisan homogeneity may be associated with economic costs. We conclude by proposing several promising directions for future research.
Istanbul Convention, which is a polarizing issue between conservative (right-wing) and liberal (left-wing) people in Turkey, is an important step in the struggle against violence against women. This thesis aims to investigate the reasons behind this polarization in the culture-war issues and make claims about possible reconciliation. In this regard, two studies were conducted, including the relationship of Moral Foundations Theory. Study 1 is qualitative research about opinions toward the Istanbul Convention and violence against women. Results of Study 1 show that violence against women is a problem that compromise exists between liberals and conservatives, but there is a polarization toward the Istanbul Convention issue in
the context of moral foundations and political ideologies literature. In addition, people’s level of awareness toward the convention is crucial to this situation. Study 2 is an experimental study investigating the moral framing effect on the polarization towards the Istanbul Convention, controlling the level of partisanship, awareness toward the convention, and demographic variables. Results of Study 2 show there is partial support for the hypotheses. Political orientation and type of framing have significant effects on the level of support for the Istanbul Convention, but the interaction of these two variables is non-significant. The results were discussed for researchers and policy-making authorities.
The military’s compliance with civilian control – a requisite of democracy – is believed to be a key determinant of public confidence in the military. However, this claim is empirically inconclusive, and its analytical framework is underdeveloped at an institutional and individual level. Furthermore, most extant studies focus on the USA, and its validity in other environments is unknown. Hence, this study examined the causal relationship via an online survey experiment using hypothetical scenarios in Japan, an established democracy with a considerable armed force and civil–military norms imported from the USA decades ago. The results showed that the Japanese participants significantly lost their trust in the military for incompliance with civilian control amid an armed conflict. However, the magnitude of the impact was context-dependent; it substantially differed per the directions of incompliance (arbitrary action or inaction), the actors involved in the control (the prime minister and legislature), and the respondents’ attributes (partisanship). These findings reduce empirical inconclusiveness regarding the mechanism of public confidence in the military and could help to detect ominous signs regarding public attitudes toward democratic principles in modern society. Moreover, this study provides clues to understanding what people in Japan think about the aspect of control of their de facto military and how they evaluate this organization. These findings have significant implications for understanding international security dynamics, particularly at a time when Japan is launching its largest arms build-up since World War II to make its defense budget the third-largest worldwide, after the USA and China.
With the growth of democracy promoting respect for human rights, military heroism has been declining in South Korea. Neither the commanders nor the citizens are willing to put their soldiers at risk of death. This study assumes that conformity to the Soldier’s Creed is a good indicator of the extent to which service members embrace military heroism because the Creed includes military values constituting military heroism. Based on this, survey data on 530 South Korean active service members were analyzed to identify promoters of military heroism. Major findings go as follows. First, the Army is moving away from the Modern military model in which heroic combat leaders are admired, indicating that the attitude towards military heroism will never be the same as it used to be. Second, military heroism is not changing into a different form. Traditional military values such as masculinity, institutional bonding, and military professionalism are positively associated with conformity to the Creed. In other words, individuals who align with traditional military values will adhere more closely to the heroic mindset. Finally, collective memories and experiences of female service members and army civilians impede military heroism from being cultivated into them, as relatively lower conformity scores for them showed.
Even though misinformation, disinformation, and fake news are not new phenomena, they have received renewed interest since political events such as Brexit and the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections. The resulting sharp increase in scholarly publications bears the risk of lack of overview, fragmentation across disciplines, and ultimately a lack of research cumulativity. To counteract these risks, we have performed a systematic research review of 1261 journal articles published between 2010 and 2021. Results show the field is mostly data-driven, frequently investigating the prevalence, dissemination, detection or characteristics of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news. There further are clear foci concerning contributing disciplines, methodologies, and data usage. Building on our results, we identify several research gaps and suggest avenues for future research.
This study examines how geopolitical forces motivate public support for foreign climate aid among US residents. This is timely: the US and other advanced economies have committed to large transfers of aid to developing economies in order to speed climate mitigation and adaptation, reflecting the deep climate injustice at the center of global climate policy. Using nationally representative data (n=917), our research advances the budding scholarship on foreign climate aid by using an experimental survey design that frames foreign climate aid in geopolitical terms by comparing US aid to that of (a) allied nations and (b) adversarial nations. We find that, relative to a baseline informational frame, comparing US aid levels to geostrategic allies (e.g., UK, France, Germany, and Japan) doubles support among US residents for providing greater aid levels. We also find that comparing US aid levels to a geostrategic competitor—in this case, China—does not increase support for foreign climate aid. In a secondary analysis, we find that the effect of comparison frame is isolated to Democrats, with Republicans showing no sign of increasing levels of support regardless of framing condition. These results indicate that it is possible to raise support for foreign climate aid among (Democratic) US residents, primarily by linking existing levels of support to geostrategic allies. These results suggest that donor competition between the US and its allies may provide activists and policymakers an opportunity to increase support for the US to meet its existing foreign climate aid obligations.
Does factual information matter for policy evaluations and attitudes? Previous research has provided different, and partly contradictive, replies to this question. To test the effect of concrete facts on attitudes, we provide findings from a survey web‐experiment concerning satisfaction with the universal sickness insurance. The treatments in the experiment are short facts from official reports on how the insurance actually work and is used. Our dependent variables are general satisfaction with how the insurance works, as well as trust for the responsible agency administering the insurance and more specified perceptions on capacity, precision, and fairness of the insurance. The results show that under certain circumstances, policy‐specific information does have an effect – even though the effects are not consistent. Effects of the information were mainly found on general evaluations of the sickness insurance rather than on specific attitudes. Furthermore, we conclude that, contrary to expectations, the effects were not conditional on left–right position, subjective knowledge, political interest, or proximity.
Does election fraud erode support for dictators? An original survey experiment from Russia following the 2020 vote on constitutional amendments reveals three key findings. First, regime supporters and opponents differ significantly in their baseline beliefs about election fairness. While regime opponents are already aware of fraud, supporters expect relatively fair elections. Consequently, only regime supporters revise their election beliefs when exposed to fraud information. Second, fraud revelations reduce regime legitimacy beliefs, but only among the regime’s political base. In contrast, regime opponents already perceive the regime as illegitimate at the baseline. Third, the experiment shows minimal, if any, effects on attitudes toward Putin. While fraud revelations cause regime supporters to adjust their views on the regime, their opinions about Putin remain largely unaffected. The findings imply that dictators can maintain popular support among their political base while manipulating elections, posing questions about the potential of fraud to undermine regime stability.
Yeni enformasyon teknolojilerinin geliştirilmesi ile birlikte dezenformasyon ve yanlış bilgi içeren veri yığınlarının tarihin hiçbir döneminde olmadığı boyutlara vardığı bilinmektedir. Dünya çapında politika yapıcılar farklı biçimlerde bu süreçten etkilenmiştir. 2016 yılında ABD’de gerçekleştirilen seçimde yaşanan veri skandalları bu sürecin kırılma noktası olmuş, Brexıt vakasının ardından birçok yeni kavram ortaya atılmıştır. Dezenformasyon ve yanlış bilgi içeren verilerin yayılması kamusal alanda politika yapıcılar ile hizmet sağlayıcılar arasında yeni bir rekabet ve gerilim alanının ortaya çıkmasına neden olmuş, dünyada hükümetler, hükümet dışı örgütler, sivil toplumla birlikte özel girişimler tarafından dezenformasyon ve sahte bilgiyle mücadelede pek çok farklı yaklaşım ve pratik uygulama geliştirilmiştir. Bu makale; doğrudan bu yeni kavram, yaklaşım ve dezenformasyon ve sahte bilgiyle mücadelede geliştirilen uygulamaları incelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. Bu amaçla sahte içeriklere maruz kalmadan önce, maruz kaldıktan sonra ve dezenformasyon ağını analiz eden uygulamalar sistematik literatür taramasıyla analiz edilmiştir. Ayrıca, dünyanın farklı coğrafyalarında çeşitli ülkeler tarafından uygulanan politika girişimleri ve Türkiye’nin dezenformasyon ve yanlış bilgiyle mücadelede alabileceği olası önlemler incelenmiştir.
Hostile interactions permeate political debates on social media, but what is driving the long-term developments in online political hostility? Prior research focuses on individual level factors such the dispositions of users or network-level factors such as echo chambers. Moving beyond these accounts, we develop and test an event-oriented explanation and demonstrate that over the course of the 2020 election year in the US, all major shifts in political hostility on the social media platform Twitter were driven by external offline events. Importantly, these events were magnified for Twitter users within the most politically hostile and most ideologically homogeneous networks. Further contributing to the individual and network-oriented accounts, we show that divisive offline events mobilized individual users not already disposed for hostility and may have helped facilitate the formation of echo chambers. The dynamics of online interactions–including their level of hostility–seem crucially dependent on developments in the offline world.
Recently, epistocrats have challenged the value of democracy by claiming that policy outcomes can be improved if the electorate were narrowed to empower only those with sufficient knowledge to inform competent policy decisions. I argue that by centering on contesting how well regimes employ extant knowledge in decision-making, this conversation has neglected to consider how regimes influence the production of knowledge over time. Science and technology studies scholars have long recognized that political systems impact the productivity of expert research. I argue that in order to evaluate which regime is “smarter,” we must consider not only how well they employ existing knowledge in decision-making, but we must also assess how those regimes influence the ongoing production of policy-relevant knowledge. Thus, I offer an instrumental defense of democracy based on its capacity to encourage a superior pattern and quality of expert research to inform policy decisions over time. Epistocracy may be effective at employing extant knowledge in the short run, but in the long run, democracy is a superior environment for producing knowledge to inform policy decisions.
Nearly, all Americans have received social policy benefits, yet many do not acknowledge “using government social programs.” Why? Work on the submerged state proposes that people who receive social assistance through market mechanisms do not realize that the benefits they get are the result of government policy, and therefore, they do not acknowledge receiving government assistance. Others point to motivated reasoning or social desirability bias to explain the gap between acknowledging and using social programs. We classify the existing literature into three broad explanations—delivery, definition, and desirability—and propose that each may be responsible for people's inability to accurately report using government social programs. We test these mechanisms with original survey experiments. The results of this study provide support for the theory that multiple mechanisms are at work in shaping social policy acknowledgment, but they confirm that a partisan acknowledgement gap exists across a variety of conditions, and it persists despite treatments designed to minimize it. The study has significant implications for the conditions under which partisanship and policy usage coalesce to undermine support for government social expenditures, and it helps to explain the persistence of a “makers vs. takers” logic in American politics.
The idea of America as politically polarized—that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states—has become a cliché. What commentators miss, however, is that increasing polarization in recent decades has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and economic changes—most notably, a parallel rise in income inequality. In Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal examine the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces, characterizing it as a dance of give and take and back and forth causality. Using NOMINATE (a quantitative procedure that, like interest group ratings, scores politicians on the basis of their roll call voting records) to measure polarization in Congress and public opinion, census data and Federal Election Commission finance records to measure polarization among the public, the authors find that polarization and income inequality fell in tandem from 1913 to 1957 and rose together dramatically from 1977 on; they trace a parallel rise in immigration beginning in the 1970s. They show that Republicans have moved right, away from redistributive policies that would reduce income inequality. Immigration, meanwhile, has facilitated the move to the right: non-citizens, a larger share of the population and disproportionately poor, cannot vote; thus there is less political pressure from the bottom for redistribution than there is from the top against it. In "the choreography of American politics" inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality.
I examine the impact of long-term partisan loyalties on perceptions of specific political figures and events. In contrast to the notion of partisanship as a simple “running tally” of political assessments, I show that party identification is a pervasive dynamic force shaping citizens' perceptions of, and reactions to, the political world. My analysis employs panel data to isolate the impact of partisan bias in the context of a Bayesian model of opinion change; I also present more straightforward evidence of contrasts in Democrats' and Republicans' perceptions of “objective” politically relevant events. I conclude that partisan bias in political perceptions plays a crucial role in perpetuating and reinforcing sharp differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans. This conclusion handsomely validates the emphasis placed by the authors of The American Voter on “the role of enduring partisan commitments in shaping attitudes toward political objects.”
Theory: Recent scholarship has emphasized the potential importance of cues, information shortcuts, and statistical aggregation processes in allowing relatively uninformed citizens to act, individually or collectively, ns if they were fully informed. Hypotheses: Uninformed voters successfully use cues and information shortcuts to behave ns if they were fully informed. Failing that, individual deviations from fully informed voting cancel out in a mass electorate, producing the same aggregate election outcome ns if voters were fully informed. Methods: Hypothetical ''fully informed'' vote choices are imputed to individual voters using the observed relationship between political information and vote choices for voters with similar social and demographic characteristics, estimated by probit analysis of data from National Election Study surveys conducted after the six most recent United States presidential elections. Results: Both hypotheses are clearly disconfirmed. At the individual level, the average deviation of actual vote probabilities from hypothetical ''fully informed'' vote probabilities was about ten percentage points. In the electorate as a whole, these deviations were significantly diluted by aggregation, but by no means eliminated: incumbent presidents did almost five percentage points better, and Democratic candidates did almost two percentage points better, than they would have if voters had in fact been ''fully informed.''
Theory: Characterizing voters as rational actors who update their party affiliations based on a Bayesian assimilation of new information, Achen (1992) showed that a revisionist model of party identification generates, among its empirical implications, stable partisanship among adults. The model further implies that susceptibility to partisan change declines with age. The significance of Achen's model for the study of party identification leads us to examine more closely its underlying assumptions and the empirical ramifications of this and other learning models. Method: This essay develops a more general learning model, based upon the Kalman filter, that encompasses the Achen model as a special case. Results: We show that the Achen assumption of a fixed party benefit level leads to implausible implications about how voters learn from the history of party performance. When party benefit levels are allowed to vary over time, models of voter learning no longer imply that partisan attitudes, even among the older segments of the population, remain stable in the wake of new information about the parties. We conclude by discussing the empirical viability of our revised learning model and its implications for the study of partisan attitudes.
In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public’s political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise. I also show that the effect of policy-specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research. Finally, I show that the effect of policy-specific ignorance is greatest for Americans with the highest levels of political knowledge. Rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information, general knowledge (and the cognitive capacities it reflects) appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy-specific information into political judgments.
We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased-information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias. We also find a confirmation bias—the seeking out of confirmatory evidence—when Ps are free to self-select the source of the arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization—the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes—especially among those with the strongest priors and highest levels of political sophistication. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of these findings for rational behavior in a democracy.
How do we make sense of other people and of ourselves? What do we know about the people we encounter in our daily lives and about the situations in which we encounter them, and how do we use this knowledge in our attempt to understand, predict, or recall their behavior? Are our social judgments fully determined by our social knowledge, or are they also influenced by our feelings and desires? Social cognition researchers look at how we make sense of other people and of ourselves. In this book Ziva Kunda provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of research and theory about social cognition at a level appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers in the field. The first part of the book reviews basic processes in social cognition, including the representation of social concepts, rules of inference, memory, "hot" cognition driven by motivation or affect, and automatic processing. The second part reviews three basic topics in social cognition: group stereotypes, knowledge of other individuals, and the self. A final chapter revisits many of these issues from a cross-cultural perspective.
▪ Abstract Do people assimilate new information in an efficient and unbiased manner—that is, do they update prior beliefs in accordance with Bayes' rule? Or are they selective in the way that they gather and absorb new information? Although many classic studies in political science and psychology contend that people resist discordant information, more recent research has tended to call the selective perception hypothesis into question. We synthesize the literatures on biased assimilation and belief polarization using a formal model that encompasses both Bayesian and biased learning. The analysis reveals (a) the conditions under which these phenomena may be consistent with Bayesian learning, (b) the methodological inadequacy of certain research designs that fail to control for preferences or prior information, and (c) the limited support that exists for the more extreme variants of the selective perception hypothesis.
s Abstract The past two decades have brought revolutionary change to the field of political methodology. Steady gains in theoretical sophistication have combined with explosive increases in computing power to produce a profusion of new estimators for applied political researchers. Attendance at the annual Summer Meeting of the Methodology Section has multiplied many times, and section membership is among the largest in APSA. All these are signs of success. Yet there are warning signs, too. This paper attempts to critically summarize current developments in the young field of political methodology. It focuses on recent generalizations of dichotomous-dependent-variable estimators such as logit and probit, arguing that even our best new work needs a firmer connection to credible models of human behavior and deeper foundations in reliable empirical generalizations.
Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, widespread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are far different from those that would exist if people were correctly informed. The misinformation phenomenon has implications for two currently influential scholarly literatures: the study of political heuristics and the study of elite persuasion and issue framing.
Panel data models have become increasingly popular among applied researchers due to their heightened capacity for capturing the complexity of human behavior as compared to cross-sectional or time series data models. As a consequence, richer panel data sets also have become increasingly available. This 2003 second edition is a substantial revision of the highly successful first edition of 1986. Advances in panel data research are presented in a rigorous and accessible manner and are carefully integrated with the older material. The thorough discussion of theory and the judicious use of empirical examples make this book useful to graduate students and advanced researchers in economics, business, sociology, political science, etc. Other specific revisions include the introduction of the notion of strict exogeneity with estimators presented in a generalized method of moments framework, the notion of incidental parameters, more intuitive explanations of pairwise trimming, and discussion of sample selection dynamic panel models.
We address the problem that occurs when inferences about counterfactuals—predictions, “what-if” questions, and causal effects—are
attempted far from the available data. The danger of these extreme counterfactuals is that substantive conclusions drawn from
statistical models that fit the data well turn out to be based largely on speculation hidden in convenient modeling assumptions
that few would be willing to defend. Yet existing statistical strategies provide few reliable means of identifying extreme
counterfactuals. We offer a proof that inferences farther from the data allow more model dependence and then develop easy-to-apply
methods to evaluate how model dependent our answers would be to specified counterfactuals. These methods require neither sensitivity
testing over specified classes of models nor evaluating any specific modeling assumptions. If an analysis fails the simple
tests we offer, then we know that substantive results are sensitive to at least some modeling choices that are not based on
empirical evidence. Free software that accompanies this article implements all the methods developed.
A previous paper showed that a simple prospective model of voting and party identification subsumed much of the social-psychological and retrospective voting literatures, in the sense that it rigorously implied their key findings and added many new ones as well. This paper extends the argument by showing that the same prospective voting model has drastic implications for conventional statistical specifications in voting research. First, linear models should be discarded in favor of a particular nonlinear specification. Second, demographics should be dropped from the list of independent variables. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45484/1/11109_2004_Article_BF00991978.pdf
BeyondtheRunningTally:PartisanBiasin Political Perceptions
- Bartels
- Larrym
Bartels,LarryM.2002.“BeyondtheRunningTally:PartisanBiasin Political Perceptions.” Political Behavior 24 (2): 117–50
Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches Knowing Your Colors: Can Knowledge Correct for Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions
- Mccarty
- Keith T Nolan
- Howard Rosenthal Poole
McCarty, Nolan, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. 2006. Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Cambridge: MIT Press. Shani, Danielle. 2006. " Knowing Your Colors: Can Knowledge Correct for Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions? " Presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.
Warren Miller and the Future of Politi-cal Data Analysis
- Achen
- Christopher
Achen, Christopher. 2000. " Warren Miller and the Future of Politi-cal Data Analysis. " Political Analysis 8 (2): 142–46.
IL 61801. Paul J. Quirk is Phil Lind Chain in U.S Politics and Repre-sentation Buddy Peyton is a graduate student in political science Jay Verkuilen is assistant professor of psychology
- Brian J Gaines
Brian J. Gaines is associate professor of political T. McClure Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801. Paul J. Quirk is Phil Lind Chain in U.S Politics and Repre-sentation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z4. Buddy Peyton is a graduate student in political science, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801. Jay Verkuilen is assistant professor of psychology, City University of New York, New York, NY 10019.
Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD Rational Learning and Partisan Attitudes
- Charles Duelfer
- Gerber
- Donald P Alan
- Green
Duelfer, Charles. 2004. Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD. http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/ duelfer.html (June 12, 2007) Gerber, Alan, and Donald P. Green. 1998. " Rational Learning and Partisan Attitudes. " American Journal of Political Science 42 (3): 794–818.
A Divider Not a Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People
- Jacobson
- Gary
Jacobson, Gary C. 2006. A Divider Not a Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People. New York: Longman.
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- Danielle Shani
Shani, Danielle. 2006. " Knowing Your Colors: Can Knowledge Correct for Partisan Bias
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Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD
- Charles Duelfer
Duelfer, Charles. 2004. Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on
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