How Partisanship Affects Factual Beliefs About Politics: NBER Working Paper

Updated: August 5, 2013

A study by ISPS Residents Fellows, John Bullock, Alan Gerber, and Greg Huber, and UC San Diego’s Seth Hill, was published as a NBER working paper (No. 19080), titled, “Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs About Politics.”

This paper has generated some press interest:

• Professor Huber was quoted in a Milwaukee Sentinel Journal article about this phenomenon, saying that, “when voters answer questions in an election poll about the performance of the economy, ‘They may really be answering a different question, which is which party do they want to win.’” (May 26)
• Dylan Matthews, at the Washington Posts’ WonkBlog, covers the study in a piece titled, “If you pay them money, partisans will tell you the truth.” (June 3)
• Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, responds to the paper by saying that, “voting is just another survey without individual consequence so voting encourages expressions of rational irrationality.” (June 4)
• The PressDemocrat also has a piece about the study, titled, “Facts, schmacts; what’s in it for me?” – “Sometimes, for the sheer joy of letting their partisan dogs out, [people will] give answers that they know are incorrect.” (June 12)
• Rich Morin, at the Pew Research Center’s blog, “FactTank” writes about the study, concluding that some poll respondents will answer incorrectly if it helps their party. (June 17)
• Cass Sunstein, at Bloomberg View, writes that GOP and Democrats actually agree on facts: “Recent studies by Yale University’s John Bullock and his co-authors suggest that with respect to facts, Democrats and Republicans disagree a lot less than we might think.” (June 17)
• Kevin Horrigan at OnlineAthens, opines that, “we’ve become so estranged that even when we know the facts, some of us won’t admit them — at least not for free — when they don’t favor our side of the argument.” (June 12)
• Sita Slavov at US News & World Report, says that, “these findings imply that concerns about polarization may be overblown,” (July 24).

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.