Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics

John G. Bullock, Alan S. Gerber, Seth J. Hill and Gregory A. Huber

No 19080, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Partisanship seems to affect factual beliefs about politics. For example, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that the deficit rose during the Clinton administration; Democrats are more likely to say that inflation rose under Reagan. We investigate whether such patterns reflect differing beliefs among partisans or instead reflect a desire to praise one party or criticize another. We develop a model of partisan survey response and report two experiments that are based on the model. The experiments show that small payments for correct and "don't know" responses sharply diminish the gap between Democrats and Republicans in responses to "partisan" factual questions. The results suggest that the apparent differences in factual beliefs between members of different parties may be more illusory than real.

JEL-codes: H0 H1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
Note: PE POL
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Published as John G. Bullock & Alan S. Gerber & Seth J. Hill & Gregory A. Huber, 2015. "Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, vol 10(4), pages 519-578.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19080.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:19080

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19080

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().