What Does the Public Know about Economic Policy, and How Does It Know It?

Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger

No 1324, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: Public opinion influences politicians, and therefore influences public policy decisions. What are the roles of self-interest, knowledge, and ideology in public opinion formation? And how do people learn about economic issues? Using a new, specially-designed survey, we find that most respondents express a strong desire to be well informed on economic policy issues, and that television is their dominant source of information. On a variety of major policy issues (e.g., taxes, social security, health insurance), ideology is the most important determinant of public opinion, while measures of self-interest are the least important. Knowledge about the economy ranks somewhere in between.

Keywords: knowledge; public opinion; ideology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 E60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2004-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe, nep-lam and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (245)

Published - published in: Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2004:1

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp1324.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: What Does the Public Know about Economic Policy, and How Does It Know It? (2004)
Working Paper: What Does the Public Know about Economic Policy, and How Does It Know It? (2004)
Working Paper: What Does the Public Know about Economic Policy, and How Does It Know It? (2004)
Working Paper: What Does the Public Know about Economic Policy, and How Does It Know It? (2004)
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:iza:izadps:dp1324

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().