Systematically Biased Beliefs about Political Influence: Evidence from the Perceptions of Political Influence on Policy Outcomes Survey

Manyscholars argue that retrospectivevoting is apowerful informationshortcut thatoffsetswidespreadvoter ignorance.Evendeeply ignorantvoters, it is claimed, caneffectivelypunish incumbents for badperformance and reward them if things gowell. But if voters’ understanding of which officials are responsible for which outcomes is systematically biased, retrospective voting becomes an independent source of political failure rather than acure for it.Wedesignandadministeranewsurveyof thegeneralpublicandpoliticalexperts to test for such biases. Our analysis reveals frequent, large, robust biases in voter attributions of responsibility for a variety of political actors and outcomes with a tendency for the public tooverestimate influence,althoughimportantexamplesofunderestimationalsoexist. Where are we to place responsibility for the conduct of our government?When we go to the polls, who can we hold accountable for the successes and failures of national policies?The president?The House?The Senate?The unelected Supreme Court? Or, given our federal system, the states, where governments are, in their complexity, a microcosm of the national government? Even for those who spend their lives studying politics, these can be extremely difficult questions to answer. —Robert Dahl (2002, 115) Voters are not merely ignorant; their beliefs about policy-relevant subjects are often systematically biased. Voters systematically overestimate the federal budget share of foreign aid and welfare, and underestimate the share of Social Security and health (Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University 1995). Less-informed voters favor systematically different policies than otherwise identical more-informed voters (Althaus 2003). The public’s beliefs about economics, the causes of cancer, and toxicology systematically diverge from the beliefs of experts (Caplan 2007; Kraus, Malmfors, and Slovic 1992; Lichter and Rothman 1999). Taken together, the evidence raises a troubling question: If politicians cater to the policy preferences of themedian voter, will inefficient and counter-productive policies win by popular demand? The strongest potential answer is that citizens vote for results, not policies. The retrospective voting literature argues that politicians win popularity by delivering prosperity, peace, safe streets, and educated students—not by pandering to the public’s beliefs about the bestmeans to achieve these ends (Fiorina 1981; Gasper and Reeves 2011; Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000). One simple heuristic—reward success, punish failure—seems to allow voters who have little, zero, or even negative knowledge about policy to extract socially beneficial behavior from their leaders. Unfortunately for democracy, this heuristic is not as foolproof as it seems. To reward success and punish failure, voters need to knowwhich government actors—if any—influence the various outcomes that voters care about and howgreat that influence is (Arceneaux 2006; Cutler 2004, 2008; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Lewis-Beck 1997; Leyden and Borrelli 1995; Rudolph and Grant 2002; Somin, forthcoming, ch. 4). As Achen and Bartels (2004, 6) put it: Bryan Caplan is a professor in the department of economics, Center for Study of Public Choice, and senior scholar at theMercatus Center at GeorgeMasonUniversity. He can be reached at [email protected]. EricCrampton is a senior lecturer in thedepartment of economics at theUniversity ofCanterbury, New Zealand. He can be reached at [email protected]. WayneA. Grove is a professor in the department of economics at LeMoyne College, Syracuse University. He can be reached at [email protected]. Ilya Somin is a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law. He can be reached at [email protected]. Fea tu res ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 760 PS • October 2013 © American Political Science Association, 2013 doi:10.1017/S1049096513001030 If jobs have been lost in a recession, something is wrong, but is that the president’s fault? If it is not, then voting on the basis of economic results may be no more rational than killing the pharaoh when the Nile does not flood. . . Well-functioning democracy does not require “whodunit” knowledge to be universal. If well-informed voters know the right people to reward and punish, and the rest of the electorate votes randomly, politicians still have clear incentives to deliver good results. The greatest danger to democracy comes from systematically biased beliefs about political influence (Caplan 2007; Kahneman 2011). Just as the market for automobile repair works poorly if the average customer blames his grocer for engine trouble, local elections work poorly if the average voter blames the president for the quality of public schools. One of the main ways that scholars have tested for the presence of systematic bias is to see whether average beliefs of laypeople and experts diverge (Caplan 2007; Kraus,Malmfors, and Slovic 1992; Lichter and Rothman 1999). We extend this approach to questions of political influence.1 To test the American public’s beliefs about political influence for systematic bias, we designed and administered a survey to two distinct groups: (1) a nationally representative sample of Americans, and (2) members of the American Political Science Association (APSA) who specialize in American politics. Systematically biased attributional beliefs turn out to be common: 14 out of 16 survey questions exhibit statistically significant biases. Compared to experts on American politics, the public greatly overestimates the influence of state and local governments on the economy, the president, andCongress on the quality of public education, the Federal Reserve on the budget, Congress on the course of the Iraqwar, and theSupremeCourt on crime rates. The public also moderately underestimates the influence of the Federal Reserve on the economy, state and local governments on public education, and the president andCongress on the budget. Perhaps noncognitive factors explain observed belief gaps. But controlling for demographics and various measures of self-serving and ideological bias does little to alter our results. Our original contribution is twofold. First, to the best of our knowledge, no other study uses a large, representative lay-expert comparison to test whether voters have systematically biased beliefs about political influence.2 Second, our full array of outcomes (macroeconomic performance, budget, education, crime, and the war in Iraq) and actors (president and Congress, Supreme Court, Federal Reserve, and state and local government) is the largest andmost comprehensive to date,with information about both vertical and horizontal clarity of responsibility (Anderson 2006; Arceneaux 2006; 1995; Cutler 2008). Our results do not imply that the American public’s beliefs about political influence are biased in every conceivable respect. Voters’ attributional judgments sometimes respond in rational ways to divided government (Lewis-Beck 1997; Leyden and Borrelli 1995; Powell andWhitten 1993; Rudolph 2003a) and federalism (Anderson 2006; Arceneaux 2006; Cutler 2004). Nevertheless, the American public’s beliefs about political influence are biased in some important respects, raising serious questions about the ability of retrospective voting to counter other cognitive shortcomings in the democratic process. DATA We administered our Perceptions of Political Influence on Policy Outcomes Survey in two phases—one for laypeople, the other for experts. In phase one, conducted February 13–18, 2008, Zogby International included our questions on an omnibus telephone survey of adults nationwide. The targets were randomly drawn from telephone compact discs of nationally listed samples, with selection probabilities proportional to population sizewithin area codes and exchanges. Zogby achieved a typical response rate of 14.6%, collecting a total of 1,215 responses. Table 1 Perceptions of Political Influence: Summary Statistics # VARIABLE QUESTION MEAN (PUBLIC) MEAN (POLISCI) This section of questions deals with parts of the government and how much influence they have over whether the economy gets stronger or weaker during the next two years. Please rate your overall opinion of each of the following as very influential, somewhat influential, not very influential or not all influential. 1 ECONSL State and local governments 1.95 2.41 2 ECONCON Congress 1.66 1.87 3 ECONPRES President 1.78 1.88 4 ECONFED Federal Reserve 1.58 1.39 This next set of questions deals with parts of the government and how much influence they have over how well the public schools educate their students. Please rate your overall opinion of each of the following as very influential, somewhat influential, not very influential or not all influential. 5 SCHOOLCON Congress 2.19 2.62 6 SCHOOLSL State and local governments 1.48 1.23 7 SCHOOLPRES President 2.33 2.83 This section of questions deals with parts of the government and how much influence they have over howmoney in the federal budget is spent. Please rate your overall opinion of each of the following as very influential, somewhat influential, not very influential or not at all influential. 8 BUDFED Federal Reserve 1.99 2.98 9 BUDCON Congress 1.47 1.16 10 BUDPRES President 1.67 1.37 The following deals with parts of the government and how much influence they have over whether the U.S. will succeed or fail in the IraqWar. Please rate your overall opinion of each of the following as very influential, somewhat influential, not very influential or not at all influential. 11 IRAQCON Congress 1.72 2.10 12 IRAQPRES President 1.47 1.45 Howmuch influence parts of government have over crime rates is what this next section deals with. Please rate your overall opinion of each of the following as very influential, somewhat influential, not very influential or not at all influential. 13 CRIMEPRES President 2.54 2.96 14 CRIMESC Supreme Court 1.98 2.76 15 CRIMESL State and local government 1.52 1.55 16 CRIMECON Congress 2.26 2.63 1=“very influential” 2 =“somewhat influential” 3 =“not very influential” 4 =“not at all influential” ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. PS • October 2013 761 OnMarch 17, 2008, we began phase two of our survey. We mailed our political influence questions—plus Zogby’s demographic and control questions—to a subset of members of APSA.3 All APSA members with US addresses who specialize in American politics were included in our sample. To qualify as “specialists in American politics,” APSA members had to list at least one of the following fields of interest: federalism/ intergovernmental relations, law and courts, legislative studies, public policy, representation/ electoral systems, presidency research, or state politics and policy. This approach yielded 2,894 names, approximately 90% of which had US mailing addresses. We continued to accept responses until July 29, 2008. By that date we had 673 responses from APSA members, with a response rate of 26%. Table 1 lists the public’s and political scientists’ mean responses to ourmainquestions. Lowernumbers indicatemore perceived influence.Table 2 lists both groups’ mean responses to Zogby’s demographic and control questions. As expected, political scientists aremarkedlymore educated, affluent, male, Democratic, and liberal than the general public. BENCHMARK RESULTS In standard rational choicemodels of belief formation, additional information reduces the variance of beliefs without changing theirmean. One implication is that the public and experts will have the same average beliefs. As long as experts are correct on average, we can test the public’s political influence beliefs for systematic bias simply by checkingwhether American politics specialists in APSA systematically disagree (Caplan 2007). In principle, admittedly, belief gaps could indicate bias in either group—or both. Beforewe consider themain challenges to political scientists’ credibility, though, we estimate some benchmark results. We use ordered logits to measure the lay-expert belief gap for all of the beliefs in table 1. Table 3 displays the estimated coefficients and z-stats when the political scientist dummy is our sole independent variable.4 The initial case for systematic bias is strong. Differences between political scientists and the general public are statistically significant in 15 out of 16 questions; the one exception is the president’s influence on the war in Iraq. The absolute value of the z-stat exceeds 4 in 14 out of 16 questions. The average absolute value of the lay-expert gap is .36 on our 4-point scale. This substantial difference—much larger than the gap between laypeople with median education levels and those with graduate degrees—is highly unlikely to result from chance or mere noise in the data. The most obvious difference between political scientists and the public is that the public thinks that politicians have more influence over outcomes. Eleven out of the 15 statistically significant belief gaps are positive, indicating that political scientists ascribe less influence to politicians than the public does. For example, the public thinks that all of the actors mentioned in our survey—the president, Congress, the Supreme Court, and state and local governments—havemore influence over crime rates than political scientists will admit. Still, the pattern is more complex than “political scientists see more randomness in politics than the public” or “the public scapegoats leaders for outcomes beyond their control.” For three of our five outcome variables, experts single out political actors with influence that the average layperson overlooks. On the economy, political scientists single out the Federal Reserve Board. On public schools, political scientists single out state Table 2 Demographic/Control Variables: Summary Statistics QUESTION MEAN (PUBLIC) MEAN (POLISCI) Which of the following best represents your race or ethnic group? White, non-Hispanic .88 .93