Ideological Perfectionism

Daniel Chen, Moti Michaeli and Daniel Spiro

No 16-47, IAST Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST)

Abstract: Studying a high-stakes field setting, we examine which individuals, on an ideological scale, conform more to the opinion of others. In the U.S. Courts of Appeals, legal precedents are set by ideologically diverse and randomly composed panels of judges. Using exogenous predictors of ideology and rich voting data we show that ideological disagreements drive dissents against the panel’s decision, but ideologically extreme judges are caving in: they are the least likely to dissent and their voting records are the least correlated with their predicted ideology. Meanwhile, moderately ideological judges are dissenting the most despite evidence that they are more often determining the opinion. Our theoretical analysis shows that these findings are most consistent with a model of decision making in the presence of peer pressure with a concave cost of deviating from one’s ideological convictions – perfectionism. This result presents a critique of a standard assumption in economics – that the cost of deviating from one’s bliss point is convex – with fundamental implications for decision making in social and political settings and for the empirical predictions of theoretical models in these domains.

Keywords: Judicial decision making; group decision making; ideology; peer pressure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 K00 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://iast.fr/pub/30836
https://www.iast.fr/sites/default/files/wp/ideological_perfectionism.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Ideological Perfectionism (2016)
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:tse:iastwp:30836

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAST Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().