Reality versus propaganda in the formation of beliefs about privatization

Tella, Rafael Di; Galiani, Sebastián; Schargrodsky, Ernesto

doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2011.11.006

Cited by 36 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 64 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Randomized questionnaire-experiments had been developed in laboratory settings (Amiel and Cowell, 1992;Cowell and Cruces, 2004), while, in the context of household surveys, Joliffe 2001and Di Tella, Galiani and Schargrodsky (2008) have randomized the allocation of questionnaire types among respondents. 8…”

Section: The Survey Experiments Setupmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biased perceptions of income distribution and preferences for redistribution: Evidence from a survey experiment

Cruces

Pérez-Truglia

Tetaz

2013

Journal of Public Economics

616

377

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Individual perceptions of income distribution play a vital role in political economy and public finance models, yet there is little evidence regarding their origins or accuracy. This study examines how individuals form these perceptions and posits that systematic biases arise from the extrapolation of information extracted from reference groups. A tailored household survey provides original evidence on the significant biases in individuals' evaluations of their own relative position in the distribution. Furthermore, the data supports the hypothesis that the selection process into the reference groups is the source of those biases. Finally, this study also assesses the practical relevance of these biases by examining their impact on attitudes towards redistributive policies. An experimental design incorporated into the survey provides consistent information on the own ranking within the income distribution to a randomly selected group of respondents. Confronting agents' biased perceptions with this information has a significant effect on their stated preferences for redistribution. Those who had overestimated their relative position and thought of themselves relatively richer than they were demand higher levels of redistribution when informed of their true ranking. This relationship between biased perceptions and political attitudes provides an alternative explanation for the relatively low degree of redistribution observed in modern democracies.

show abstract

Section: The Survey Experiments Setupmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biased perceptions of income distribution and preferences for redistribution: Evidence from a survey experiment

Cruces

Pérez-Truglia

Tetaz

2013

Journal of Public Economics

616

377

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…There was no major election during the period of study, and nation-wide elections scheduled for 2013 were postponed, and later boycotted by the main opposition, marred by widespread violence and extremely low turnout nationally (Barry, 2014). To ensure that these subjective responses are meaningful, we used questions similar to those found in widely-used and widely-cited international surveys that measure public In another influential paper, Di Tella, Galiani, and Schargrodsky (2007) relies on a series of respondent normative judgements to evaluate the effects of a privatization experiment.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Snyder and Strömberg (2010) and Eisensee and Strömberg (2007) have studied how the media affect the allocation of politician time and effort. Also related is literature on the effects of development programs on changes in political attitudes and ideology (e.g., Di Tella, Galiani, and Schargrodsky, 2007;Pop-Eleches and Pop-Eleches, 2012;Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov, 2012). While a few studies have examined general equilibrium labor market effects of randomized interventions (Crépon et al, 2013;Mobarak and Rosenzweig, 2014), this paper is the first, to our knowledge, to analyze an RCT through the lens of an equilibrium political economy model.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Development Aid Undermine Political Accountability? Leader and Constituent Responses to a Large-Scale Intervention

Guiteras

Mobarak

2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Comprehensive evaluation requires tracking indirect effects of interventions, such as politicians and constituents reacting to the arrival of a development program. We study political economy responses to a large scale intervention in Bangladesh, where 346 communities consisting of 16,600 households were randomly assigned to control, information or subsidy treatments to encourage investments in improved sanitation. In one intervention where the leaders' role in program allocation was not clear to constituents, leaders react by spending more time in treatment areas, and treated constituents appear to attribute credit to their local leader for a randomly assigned program. In contrast, in another lottery where subsidy assignment is clearly and transparently random, the lottery winners do not attribute any extra credit to the politician relative to lottery losers. These reactions are consistent with a model in which constituents have imperfect information about leader ability. A third intervention returns to a random subset of treated households to inform them that the program was externally funded and randomly assigned. This simple, scalable information treatment eliminates the excess credit that leaders received in villages that received subsidies. These results suggest that while politicians may respond to try to take credit for development programs, it is not easy for them do so. Political accountability is not easily undermined by development aid.

show abstract

“…Similar results are found by Mastrorocco et al (2016) for Italy, where lower exposure to crime-related news reduced concerns about crime. Other recent papers in this field explore the impact of government propaganda on beliefs about water privatization (Di Tella et al, 2012), the impact of information about one's place in the income distribution on tastes for redistribution (Cruces et al, 2013), the impact of corrective information on the rejection of false rumors about health care (Berinsky, 2017), information about unemployment forecasts on economic expectations (Alt et al, 2016), information about government provision of public goods on tax compliance (Castro and Scartascini, 2015a), and information about government promises and performance on trust (Alessandro et al, 2018).…”

Section: This Work Uses the Conditional Association Between Measures mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Heavy Hand or a Helping Hand? Information Provision and Citizen Preferences for Anti-Crime Policies

Gingerich¹,

Scartascini²

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license. Following a peer review process, and with previous written consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a revised version of this work may also be reproduced in any academic journal, including those indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. Therefore, the restriction to receive income from such publication shall only extend to the publication's author(s). With regard to such restriction, in case of any inconsistency between the Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license and these statements, the latter shall prevail. Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Inter-American Development Bank, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.

show abstract

Reality versus propaganda in the formation of beliefs about privatization

Cited by 36 publications

References 64 publications

Biased perceptions of income distribution and preferences for redistribution: Evidence from a survey experiment

Biased perceptions of income distribution and preferences for redistribution: Evidence from a survey experiment

Does Development Aid Undermine Political Accountability? Leader and Constituent Responses to a Large-Scale Intervention

A Heavy Hand or a Helping Hand? Information Provision and Citizen Preferences for Anti-Crime Policies

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About