Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics

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. What remains unclear is whether such patterns reflect differing beliefs among partisans or instead reflect a desire to praise one party or criticize another. To shed light on this question, we present a model of survey response An earlier version of this paper was circulated as NBER Working Paper 19080 and was presented at Harvard, MIT, NYU, Princeton, Stanford, UCSD, UT-Austin, Yale, and the Annual Meetings of the American Political Science and Midwest Online Appendix available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00014074_app Supplementary Material available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00014074_supp MS submitted 14 June 2014; final version received 11 May 2015 ISSN 1554-0626; DOI 10.1561/100.00014074 © 2015 J. G. Bullock, A. S. Gerber, S. J. Hill and G. A. Huber