It's safe to say that these aren't the best of times for President Bush supporters. Depending on your point of view, every month seems to bring a new problem, a new screw-up, or a new impeachable offense. What is interesting is that, despite talk of him being the worst president ever, some 30% of the public still approves of Bush's job performance. "How is this even possible?" asked one of my relatives in India.
Perhaps part of the answer can be found in this very interesting paper by economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Ebonya Washington. Standard economic models of voting posit that individuals express their preferences through their vote. The authors suggest, however, that it is possible for the act of voting to influence beliefs and preferences. How does this occur? As the authors note:
One explanation for the impact of behaviors on beliefs is cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) which refers to one’s internal need for consistency. If an individual performs an activity that is antithetical to his beliefs, the individual may unconsciously change his beliefs to alleviate the discomfort of having inconsistent attitudes and actions.
In order to test for behavioral effects of voting, the authors use an ingenious "natural experiment." First off, note that if we were to take the general population and run a regression of beliefs on voting, the results would be difficult to interpret: does the causality run from voting to beliefs or beliefs to voting? To get around that problem, Mullainathan and Washington exploit the age discontinuity in voting eligibility (i.e. 17 years olds can't vote, but 19 years olds can) and check the beliefs of these individuals two years later. They find that those who voted (the then 19 now 21 year olds) show more polarizing opinions than comparable individuals who did not (then 17, now 19 year olds). Note that, for this to work, those who voted and those who did not due to age restrictions should look the same as far as their traits and such. The authors go to some difficulty to establish this.
I buy it. In 2000, I put my support behind then Governor G. W. Bush. For the next few years, I felt myself supporting the Bush administration's policies less and less (and less and less), but, at least for a few months, I viscerally experienced some weird feeling (shame?) from having acted in one way and, subsequently, believing another. I'm happy to report that I am no longer upset about this and at peace with my anti-neocon stance, but the experience of being dissonant really did resonate with me.
More on voting: I'm really interested in reading this new book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan. Supposedly the book is about why voters act stupidly with respect to their best interests.
2 comments:
A powerful point, and, as is often the case with such things, one that seems quite apparent once you hear it. Certainly fits in well with the psychology literature of group identification and bonding...depressingly, it also suggests that barring an absolute meltdown, a political party will rarely get its just desserts, but rather just slowly bleed out from election to election. Perhaps a good reminder that we need to pause and evaluate our initial reactions to situations sometimes.
Your research on the social grants is quite interesting, not to mention topical. As you're probably aware, it's a very contentious political point right now, and one that has a lot of ramifications for the families on the grants. Indeed, you've probably heard about the allegations that some patients go off ARVs to maintain their CD4s on a low level, precisely so they don't lose the grant! Overall it argues for a more rational grant process (based on overall clinical appearance, perhaps) and some moves to remove possible perverse incentives.
I'll be interested to hear about your results, as shall many of the doctors, social workers, and nurses I know back in RSA.
Thanks James. I definitely wanted to ping you on the grants issue...and it looks like my instincts were right: you know quite a bit about it. The perverse incentive issue is something we are looking into, also.
What do you think an ideal set of incentives would look like?
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