Suchergebnisse

Do Republicans and Democrats agree about the state of the economy? In this chapter, I describe a research project which uses cross-sectional survey data to better understand the economic perceptions of political partisans. My research process began with a deep dive into public opinion repositories, as I sought to better understand the gaps between Republican? and Democrat? beliefs about economic reality. After collecting national surveys which captured both party identification and economic questions, I assessed basic patterns in partisan? biased beliefs about the economy. But in addition, this investigation also unveiled the existence of questions tapping partisan? justifications for their economic perception?a surprising and theoretically compelling resource. Based on the availability of these data, I proposed a new research question, a theory, and additional hypotheses. I relied on logistic regression methods to assess these hypotheses, using interaction terms to assess how partisanship and economic perceptions combine to affect partisan? justifications for their beliefs. In this case study, I explain how other researchers might use thorough searches of survey repositories to similarly drive the formulation of rarely explored quantitative research questions and hypotheses.

The U.S. Federal Reserve plays a major role in the global economy, despite low public awareness of its functions and responsibilities. Scholars have recently noted three ongoing developments in the politics of the Fed: A dramatic increase in the size of the Fed's balance sheet, a decrease in the Fed's insulation from partisan politics, and evidence that the Fed has struggled to manage inflation in recent times. Despite the contributions of recent studies, little is known about how Americans' levels of diffuse and specific public support for Federal agencies are influenced by trends in agencies' size and scope, politicization, and performance. In this study, I use a survey experimental design to evaluate the effects of emphasis frames on support for the Federal Reserve. Results demonstrate that while specific support declines in reaction to frames that associate Fed actions with rising inflation, messages about the Fed's growing balance sheet erode diffuse support for the Fed. However, when reminded of the Fed's declining political independence, partisans' levels of support diverge. These results imply the potential for substantial future declines in public support for the operation of this critical, yet largely overlooked, Federal institution, especially among partisans of the presidential out-party.

Does epistemic confidence affect Americans' willingness to defend misperceptions in the face of correction? Individuals with excessive confidence in their political knowledge are expected to resist the effects of corrective cues against political misperceptions. In this study, I assess the effects of confidence on skepticism towards five common political misperceptions in observational and experimental settings. In Study 1, I observationally assess the effects of epistemic confidence on resistance to corrective cues. In Study 2, I temper excessive confidence among a random subset of respondents using a specialized experimental treatment, before exposing them to a corrective cue. Together, the results show that corrections can reduce support for misperceptions among those with modest confidence. However, in the presence of excessive epistemic confidence, these treatments are ineffective. The present findings suggest that epistemic confidence complicates the work of fact-checkers and science communicators in modern democratic politics.

Recent research has shown that Amazon MTurk workers exhibit substantially more effort and attention than respondents in student samples when participating in survey experiments. In this paper, I examine when and why low-cost online survey participants provide effortful responses to survey experiments in political science. I compare novice and veteran MTurk workers to participants in Qualtrics's qBus, a comparable online omnibus program. The results show that MTurk platform participation is associated with substantially greater effort across a variety of indicators of effort relative to demographically-matched peers. This effect endures even when compensating for the amount of survey experience accumulated by respondents, suggesting that MTurk workers may be especially motivated due to an understudied self-selection mechanism. Together, the findings suggest that novice and veteran MTurk workers alike are preferable to comparable convenience sample participants when performing complex tasks.

A widely cited finding in social psychology holds that individuals with low levels of competence will judge themselves to be higher achieving than they really are. In the present study, I examine how the so‐called "Dunning‐Kruger effect" conditions citizens' perceptions of political knowledgeability. While low performers on a political knowledge task are expected to engage in overconfident self‐placement and self‐assessment when reflecting on their performance, I also expect the increased salience of partisan identities to exacerbate this phenomenon due to the effects of directional motivated reasoning. Survey experimental results confirm the Dunning‐Kruger effect in the realm of political knowledge. They also show that individuals with moderately low political expertise rate themselves as increasingly politically knowledgeable when partisan identities are made salient. This below‐average group is also likely to rely on partisan source cues to evaluate the political knowledge of peers. In a concluding section, I comment on the meaning of these findings for contemporary debates about rational ignorance, motivated reasoning, and political polarization.

This paper analyzes the effects of biases in economic information on partisans' economic perceptions. In survey experiments, I manipulate the presence of partisan cues and the direction of proattitudinal information in news stories about the American economy. Results demonstrate that although proattitudinal tone in factual economic news stories most strongly affects partisans' economic perceptions, inclusion of partisan cues alongside proattitudinal information results in weaker shifts in economic sentiment relative to stories lacking partisan content. These findings suggest that the relatively subtle process of agenda setting in economic news may be the most effective tool used by partisan news outlets to drive polarization in citizens' factual economic perceptions.