Correcting Mistakes: Cognitive Dissonance and Political Attitudes in Sweden and the United States

Mikael Elinder

No 802, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting makes people more positive toward the party or candidate they have voted for. Following Mullainathan and Washington (2009), I test this prediction by using exogenous variation in turnout provided by the voting age restriction. I improve on previous studies by investigating political attitudes, measured just before elections, when they are highly predictive of voting. In contrast to earlier studies I find no effect of voting on political attitudes. This result holds for a variety of political attitudes and for both Sweden and the United States.

Keywords: Cognitive Dissonance; Voting; Elections; Political Attitudes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B59 C21 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2009-06-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifn.se/Wfiles/wp/wp802.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Correcting mistakes: cognitive dissonance and political attitudes in Sweden and the United States (2012)
Working Paper: Correcting Mistakes: Cognitive Dissonance and Political Attitudes in Sweden and the United States (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0802

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elisabeth Gustafsson ().