It's No Longer the Economy, Stupid: Selective Perception and Attribution

• In Event: Perceptions and Bias

Abstract

Scholars of American politics have long touted retrospective economic voting as a means by which citizens capably exercise democratic accountability, despite their overall inattentiveness to politics, and susceptibility to elite manipulation. This may no longer be the case. Using data from the American National Election Study, General Social Survey, and original survey experiments, I present evidence that, in an era of rising polarization, the relationship between incumbent reelection and economic performance has weakened considerably. I argue that the decline is explained by two psychological mechanisms for motivated reasoning: first, citizens are increasingly likely to misperceive the economy if perceiving it correctly would mean acknowledging the seeming successes of the other party, or the apparent failings of their own. Second, even when citizens perceive the economy correctly, they often selectively attribute actual credit or blame for economic outcomes in a manner consistent with their partisanship. I present evidence that citizens engage in both selective perception and selective attribution, and that they tradeoff between these two strategies depending on which is the least cognitively effortful. Taken together, this suggests a serious challenge for democratic accountability in an era of growing affective polarization.

Author

• Sean Freeder, University of California Berkeley