Just the facts, please.

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinions,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “but not to his own facts.” Unfortunately, a decade of political science has demonstrated that, when it comes to politics, the line between facts and opinions is often blurred and occasionally obliterated. The current election season provides some prime examples.Consider: “Do you think the unemployment rate has increased or decreased since Barack Obama became president?”

That seems like a pretty straightforward factual question, but Americans’ answers are all over the map. Almost one-third of the 1000 respondents in a recent YouGov survey said that unemployment has “increased a lot” since the president took office, while a similar number said that it had “decreased a little” or even “decreased a lot.” (What do you think? The correct answer appears below.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of this variation in beliefs is attributable to partisan biases. More than 60% of Republicans said that unemployment has increased a lot, while almost as many Democrats said that it hasdecreased. In both cases, their beliefs were conveniently consistent with their party loyalties. 

Read the rest at YouGov | Model Politics

Our Own Facts
by Larry Bartels in Model Politics

We often think of election outcomes as collective verdicts on the state of the nation under the incumbent president. As political scientist Morris Fiorina put it long ago, “In order to ascertain whether the incumbents have performed poorly or well, citizens need only calculate the changes in their own welfare.” Are we better off now than we were four years ago?

What happens, then, if citizens are not really up to calculating “changes in their own welfare”—if our judgments about even the most salient and straightforward aspects of our collective well-being are based more on partisan biases and media buzz than on reality? In that case, the “rough justice” Fiorina claimed to discern in election outcomes will be very rough indeed.