I am Right and I Know It

• In Event: Perceptions and Bias

Abstract

Over-confidence has important effects on a host of human behaviors. Recently, political scientists and economists have begun to pay attention to over-confidence as a potential explanation of political
participation and ideological extremism. Ortoleva and Snowberg (2015) show that individuals scoring high on over-confidence are more likely to participate in politics and to be more ideologically extreme. In experimental work Anson (2018) shows that over-confidence is an important barrierer for voters to accept that they lack knowledge, particularly when their partisan identity are invoked.

In this paper we use three representative samples of the Danish voting population and show that over-confidence has a positive effect on an individal’s propensity to participate in politics. We find that this effect is robust when controlling for personality traits as defined by the Big 5, ideology and traditional SES variables. We do not find any effects of over-confidence on political ideology as suggested by the literature. Using twin data we also show that over-confidence has a
large heritable component.

The paper therefore adds to our literature by suggesting that over-confident citizens are more likely to participate in politics and therefore also more likely to be heard in the democratic process as
well as to get elected.

Authors

• Robert Klemmensen, University of Southern Denmark

• David Dreyer Lassen, University of Copenhagen

• Soren Serritzlew, Aarhus University

• Sune Welling Hansen, University of Southern Denmark