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An Experimental Examination of Measurement Disparities in Public Climate Change Beliefs
The demand for flood insurance is low when the frequency and severity of flood disasters are increasing due to climate change. We show that beliefs about climate change influence homeowners' choice and level of flood insurance coverage. The demand for voluntary flood insurance coverage for homes and contents is higher in areas with more people who are worried about global warming. Property‐level analysis shows that individuals are more likely to terminate flood insurance after unanticipated premium increases if they do not perceive climate change as a risk. We use the heterogeneous impact of widening partisan polarization on climate change beliefs to rule out alternative explanations.
In 2010 and 2011, highly visible national surveys documented frequent failure among the public, especially among Republicans, to acknowledge that Barack Obama was born in the United States. However, different questions yielded strikingly different results. The highest rate of partisan division was generated by a CBS/ New York Times closed-ended question that included potentially leading introductory sentences. The smallest partisan gap in apparent misinformation was generated by an ABC News/ Washington Post open-ended question that did not ask a follow-up that was needed to gauge public beliefs about whether Mr. Obama was born in the United States. This paper reviews the polls on birtherism and describes an experiment embedded in a nationally representative sample survey testing whether methodological features of these two questions might have distorted their results and caused the apparent discrepancy between them. A version of the closed-ended question including the leading introductory sentences yielded a much larger degree of apparent partisan division than did a version of the question without the introductory sentences. Following the open question with another question that clarified people’s beliefs (asking about whether Hawaii was part of the United States at the time of Barack Obama’s birth) did not alter the conclusions supported by that item about the accuracy of public understanding. This study therefore illustrates how different question wording caused different polls to produce notably different results and provides a caution about the use of potentially leading wording.