Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T13:37:23.824Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

More Accurate, But No Less Polarized: Comparing the Factual Beliefs of Government Officials and the Public

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

Nathan Lee Open the ORCID record for Nathan Lee [Opens in a new window] ,
Brendan Nyhan Open the ORCID record for Brendan Nyhan [Opens in a new window] ,
Jason Reifler  and
D. J. Flynn
Nathan Lee
Affiliation:
Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA
Brendan Nyhan*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA
Jason Reifler
Affiliation:
University of Exeter, UK
D. J. Flynn
Affiliation:
IE School of Global and Public Affairs, Madrid, Spain
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Studies of the American public demonstrate that partisans often diverge not only on questions of opinion but also on matters of fact. However, little is known about partisan divergence in factual beliefs among the government officials who make real policy decisions, or how it compares to belief polarization among the public. This letter describes the first systematic comparison of factual belief polarization between the public and government officials, which we conducted using a paired survey approach. The results indicate that political elites are consistently more accurately informed than the public across a wide range of politically contentious facts. However, this increase in accuracy does not translate into reduced factual belief polarization. These findings demonstrate that a more informed political elite does not necessarily mitigate partisan factual disagreement in policy making.

Keywords

belief polarizationmisperceptionselite opinion
Type
Letter
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 1315 - 1322
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bafumi, J and Herron, MC (2010) Leapfrog representation and extremism: a study of American voters and their members in Congress. American Political Science Review 104(3), 1–24.Google Scholar
Benton, J (2013) Attention fact-checkers: dangle a buck in front of partisans and they'll come closer to the truth. Nieman Journalism Lab, 3 June. Downloaded 27 January 2019. Available from http://archive.is/0o0lp.Google Scholar
Broockman, DE and Skovron, C (2018) Bias in perceptions of public opinion among political elites. American Political Science Review 112(3), 542–563.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bullock, JG and Lenz, G (2019) Partisan bias in surveys. Annual Review of Political Science 22, 325–342.Google Scholar
Bullock, JG et al. (2015) Partisan bias in factual beliefs about politics. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 10(4), 519–578.Google Scholar
Ding, D et al. (2011) Support for climate policy and societal action are linked to perceptions about scientific agreement. Nature Climate Change 1(9), 462–466.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frankovic, K (2016) Belief in conspiracies largely depends on political identity. YouGov, 27 December. Downloaded 4 April 2018. Available from http://archive.fo/Txz8x.Google Scholar
Frankovic, K (2018) Russia's impact on the election seen through partisan eyes. YouGov, 9 March. Downloaded 4 April 2018. Available from http://archive.fo/4H8bO.Google Scholar
Gottfried, JA et al. (2013) Did fact checking matter in the 2012 presidential campaign? American Behavioral Scientist 57(11), 1558–1567.Google Scholar
Guess, AM et al. (2020) ‘Fake news’ may have limited effects beyond increasing beliefs in false claims. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review 1(1).Google Scholar
Horsley, S (2017) Ahead of Trump's first jobs report, a look at his remarks on the numbers. National Public Radio. 29 January. Downloaded 4 March 2020. Available from https://www.npr.org/2017/01/29/511493685/ahead-of-trumps-first-jobs-report-a-look-at-his-remarks-on-the-numbers.Google Scholar
Jerit, J and Barabas, J (2012) Partisan perceptual bias and the information environment. Journal of Politics 74(3), 672–684.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahan, DM et al. (2015) Ideology or situation sense: an experimental investigation of motivated reasoning and professional judgment. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 164, 349–439.Google Scholar
Kahan, DM et al. (2017) Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government. Behavioural Public Policy 1(1), 54–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kessler, G (2019) President Trump tweets nonsensical figures on illegal immigration. Washington Post. 29 January. Downloaded 4 March 2020. Available from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/29/president-trump-tweets-nonsensical-figures-illegal-immigration/.Google Scholar
Lee, N, Nyhan, B, Reifler, J and Flynn, DJ (2020) “Replication Data for: More Accurate, But No Less Polarized: Comparing the Factual Beliefs of Government Officials and the Public”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RNPR9U, Harvard Dataverse, V1.Google Scholar
Lupton, R, Myers, W and Thornton, J (2015) Political sophistication and the dimensionality of elite and mass attitudes, 1980–2004. Journal of Politics 77(2), 368–380.Google Scholar
Nyhan, B (2010) Why the ‘death panel’ myth won't die: misinformation in the health care reform debate. The Forum 8(1).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nyhan, B and Reifler, J (2015) The effect of fact-checking on elites: a field experiment on U.S. state legislators. American Journal of Political Science 59(3), 628–640.Google Scholar
Prior, M, Sood, G and Khanna, K (2015) You cannot be serious: The impact of accuracy incentives on partisan bias in reports of economic perceptions. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 10(4), 489–518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roush, CE and Sood, G (n.d.) A Gap in Our Understanding? Reconsidering the Evidence for Partisan Knowledge Gaps. Unpublished manuscript. Downloaded 26 February 2020. Available from http://www.gsood.com/research/papers/partisan_gap.pdf.Google Scholar
Sides, J and Citrin, J (2007) European opinion about immigration: the role of identities, interests and information. British Journal of Political Science 37(3), 477–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van der Linden, S, Leiserowitz, A and Maibach, E (2018) Scientific agreement can neutralize politicization of facts. Nature Human Behaviour 2(1), 2–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Lee et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RNPR9U
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Lee et al. supplementary material

Lee et al. supplementary material

Download Lee et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 332.6 KB