计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. Citizens are very sensitive to environmental contextual factors such as the title 'President' preceding 'Obama' in a newspaper headline, upbeat music or patriotic symbols accompanying a campaign ad, or question wording and order in a survey, all of which have their greatest influence when citizens are unaware. This book develops and tests a dual-process theory of political beliefs, attitudes and behavior, claiming that all thinking, feeling, reasoning and doing have an automatic component as well as a conscious deliberative component. The authors are especially interested in the impact of automatic feelings on political judgments and evaluations. This research is based on laboratory experiments, which allow the testing of five basic hypotheses: hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion and motivated reasoning.

/pdf/the-rationalizing-voter-4akj0f6dju.pdf

The Rationalizing Voter

Issue framing is one of the most important means of elite influence on public opinion. However, we know almost nothing about how citizens respond to frames in what is possibly the most common situation in politics: when frames are sponsored by political parties. Linking theory on motivated reasoning with framing research, we argue not only that citizens should be more likely to follow a frame if it is promoted by “their” party; we expect such biases to be more pronounced on issues at the center of party conflicts and among the more politically aware. Two experiments embedded in a nationally representative survey support these arguments. Our findings revise current knowledge on framing, parties, and public opinion.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/S002238161000006X

Political Parties, Motivated Reasoning, and Issue Framing Effects

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/j.0022-3816.2004.00301.x

The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited

In this chapter, I provide argument and evidence that the scope of people's ignorance is often invisible to them. This meta-ignorance (or ignorance of ignorance) arises because lack of expertise and knowledge often hides in the realm of the “unknown unknowns” or is disguised by erroneous beliefs and background knowledge that only appear to be sufficient to conclude a right answer. As empirical evidence of meta-ignorance, I describe the Dunning–Kruger effect, in which poor performers in many social and intellectual domains seem largely unaware of just how deficient their expertise is. Their deficits leave them with a double burden—not only does their incomplete and misguided knowledge lead them to make mistakes but those exact same deficits also prevent them from recognizing when they are making mistakes and other people choosing more wisely. I discuss theoretical controversies over the interpretation of this effect and describe how the self-evaluation errors of poor and top performers differ. I also address a vexing question: If self-perceptions of competence so often vary from the truth, what cues are people using to determine whether their conclusions are sound or faulty?

The Dunning-Kruger effect: On being ignorant of one's own ignorance.

We report the results of an experiment designed to replicate and extend recent findings on motivated political reasoning. In particular, we are interested in disconfirmation biases - the tendency to counter-argue or discount information with which one disagrees - in the processing of political arguments on policy issues. Our experiment examines 8 issues, including some of local relevance and some of national relevance, and manipulates the presentation format of the policy arguments. We find strong support for our basic disconfirmation hypothesis: people seem unable to ignore their prior beliefs when processing arguments or evidence. We also find that this bias is moderated by political sophistication and strength of prior attitude. We do not find, however, that argument type matters, suggesting that motivated biases are quite robust to changes in argument format. Finally, we find strong support for the polarization of attitudes as a consequence of biased processing.

The Motivated Processing of Political Arguments

We report the results of an experiment designed to replicate and extend recent findings on motivated political reasoning. In particular, we are interested in disconfirmation biases—the tendency to counter-argue or discount information with which one disagrees—in the processing of political arguments on policy issues. Our experiment examines 8 issues, including some of local relevance and some of national relevance, and manipulates the presentation format of the policy arguments. We find strong support for our basic disconfirmation hypothesis: people seem unable to ignore their prior beliefs when processing arguments or evidence. We also find that this bias is moderated by political sophistication and strength of prior attitude. We do not find, however, that argument type matters, suggesting that motivated biases are quite robust to changes in argument format. Finally, we find strong support for the polarization of attitudes as a consequence of biased processing.

Since the United States Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, the public's support for the judicial system looms as an especially important concern. Although studies have confirmed that the Supreme Court's reservoir of public goodwill has remained largely intact following the politically divisive decision, the status of public support for other American courts has received little attention. This reflects a broader trend in judicial politics scholarship toward placing inordinate attention on explaining public support for the U.S. Supreme Court while largely ignoring the courts where most of the policymaking in the nation occurs—state courts. We use a national survey to assess the factors influencing diffuse support for state courts. We find that although many considerations affecting diffuse support for state courts parallel the determinants of such support for the nation's high Court, important differences exist between explanations of citizen support for state courts and the Supreme Court. Most notab...

Homegrown Institutional Legitimacy Assessing Citizens' Diffuse Support for State Courts

In the years following the United States Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, the public's support for the judicial system looms as an especially important concern. While studies have confirmed that the Supreme Court's reservoir of public good will has remained largely intact following the politically divisive decision, the status of public support for other American courts has received little attention. This reflects a broader trend in judicial politics scholarship toward placing inordinate attention on explaining public support for the U.S. Supreme Court, while largely ignoring the courts where most of the policy-making in the nation occurs - state courts. We use 2001 survey data from a nationwide sample to assess the factors influencing diffuse citizen support for state courts. We find that many of the considerations affecting diffuse support for state courts parallel the determinants of such support for the nation's high Court. However, we also find important differences between explanations of citizen support for state courts and the Supreme Court.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID870592_code454290.pdf?abstractid=870592

Homegrown Institutional Legitimacy: Assessing Citizens' Diffuse Support for their State Courts

For decades, scholars have been interested in the effect of party identification on vote choice. Indeed, candidate party affiliation is seen as the most meaningful cue to voters in terms of which candidate they should support. However, there is a large set of elections in the U.S. that are nonpartisan. Using both experimental data and the first national survey of voters in judicial elections, we probe the effectiveness of the nonpartisan ballot format in keeping partisan considerations out of citizens’ minds when voting in judicial elections. Results based on the experimental and observational data are consistent and show that voters’ decisions are influenced strongly by party identification in both partisan and nonpartisan elections. This suggests that in judicial elections voters are able to successfully bring partisan and/or ideological information to bear on their voting decisions in both partisan and nonpartisan ballot formats, rendering nonpartisan elections ineffective at removing the partisan element from elections.

Damon M. Cann

Papers

The Motivated Processing of Political Arguments

The Motivated Processing of Political Arguments

Homegrown Institutional Legitimacy Assessing Citizens' Diffuse Support for State Courts

Homegrown Institutional Legitimacy: Assessing Citizens' Diffuse Support for their State Courts

Party Identification and Vote Choice in Partisan and Nonpartisan Elections