How do voters form positive economic beliefs? Evidence from the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy

Bryan Caplan ()

Public Choice, 2006, vol. 128, issue 3, 367-381

Abstract: Beliefs about normative economics appear to be primarily determined by sociotropic rather than egocentric variables. (Sears & Funk, 1990; Citrin & Green, 1990) Using the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy, the current paper finds that the same holds for positiveeconomic beliefs in most – but not all – cases. This hinges on whether a question is “causal” or “non-causal”: Causal beliefs depend on sociotropic variables, especially education and ideology; non-causal beliefs, in contrast, depend on egocentric variables, with income growth playing the leading role. This is consistent with a cognitive model where actors answer easier questions using personal experience, and harder ones with ``off-the-shelf" theories. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Keywords: Economic beliefs; Sociotropic voting; Voter cognition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11127-006-9026-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:pubcho:v:128:y:2006:i:3:p:367-381

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11127-006-9026-z

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().