The Imperfect Beliefs Voting Model

Ogden, Benjamin

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2431447

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 89 publications

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“…Methodologically, we contribute to a burgeoning literature in political economy that incorporates psychological concepts into formal models. For example, Ashworth and Bueno do Mesquita (Gerber and Green 1999), or make random mistakes in their belief formation (Ogden 2016). 9…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Motivated reasoning and democratic accountability

Little¹,

Schnakenberg²,

Turner³

2020

Preprint

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Standard political agency models assume voters form accurate beliefs about how politicians are performing. However, substantial evidence from political behavior research indicates that voters have ``directional motives'' beyond accuracy. These results are often taken as evidence that voters will not be able to hold politicians accountable for their actions. We probe this conclusion by formalizing a model of accountability where voters form beliefs with both directional and accuracy motives. We classify the effects of directional motives into (1) divergence, which causes people with different preferences to hold different beliefs about relevant facts, and (2) desensitization, which leads to a weaker relationship between incumbent performance and voter beliefs. We show that divergence has an ambiguous impact on politician behavior but desensitization uniformly decreases incentives to perform well in office. A key implication of our analysis is that motivated reasoning generally does harm democratic accountability, but this is not because partisans get more polarized, but because all voters become less sensitive to changes in incumbent performance. We also explore the implications for empirical work which examines the relationship between performance indicators and incumbent vote shares. While directional motivated reasoning always weakens the strength of this relationship, we can't necessarily infer that accountability is diminished.

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Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Motivated reasoning and democratic accountability

Little¹,

Schnakenberg²,

Turner³

2020

Preprint

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“…This is also intuitive, as candidates can credibly communicate to all voters their choice of platform, corresponding to the result in Proposition 1. 17 Proposition 6. Consider the game with M targeted platforms.…”

Section: Limited Policy Targetingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral Competition with Strategic Disclosure

Bizzotto

Solow

2019

SSRN Journal

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Recent developments in information and communication technologies allow candidates for office to engage in sophisticated messaging strategies to influence voter choice. We consider how access to different technologies influence the choice of policy platforms by candidates. We find that when candidates can target messages to specific voter groups, platforms are more likely to be inefficient. In particular, when candidates can run targeted campaigns, they commit to projects that benefit small groups even when the social cost of these projects outweigh their benefits. Our results are robust to negative advertising.

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“…Several formal models in economics and political science explore potential causes or implications of non‐Bayesian formation of beliefs (e.g., Gerber and Green ; Levy and Razin ; Minozzi ; Ogden ; Ortoleva and Snowberg ; Patty and Weber ; Rabin and Schrag ; Stone ); see Bénabou and Tirole () for a recent review. Even small deviations from standard Bayesian belief formation can have major implications in canonical models of political accountability (Ashworth and Bueno De Mesquita ; Patty and Weber ; Woon ), party competition (Nunnari and Zápal ; Ogden ), and coordination (Little ).…”

Section: Related Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Distortion of Related Beliefs

Little

2019

American J Political Sci

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When forming beliefs about themselves, politics, and how the world works more generally, people often face a tension between conclusions they inherently wish to reach and those which are plausible. And the likelihood of beliefs about one variable (e.g., the performance of a favored politician) depends on beliefs about other, related variables (e.g., the quality and bias of newspapers reporting on the politician). I propose a formal approach to combine these two forces, creating a tractable way to study the distortion of related beliefs. The approach unifies several central ideas from psychology (e.g., motivated reasoning, attribution) that have been applied heavily to political science. Concrete applications shed light on why successful individuals sometimes attribute their performance to luck ("imposter syndrome"), why those from advantaged groups believe they in fact face high levels of discrimination (the "persecution complex"), and why partisans disagree about the accuracy and bias of news sources.

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The Imperfect Beliefs Voting Model

Cited by 7 publications

References 89 publications

Motivated reasoning and democratic accountability

Motivated reasoning and democratic accountability

Electoral Competition with Strategic Disclosure

The Distortion of Related Beliefs

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