The Politics of Self-Interest: A Field Experiment

• In Event: Government Responsiveness: Real and Perceived

Abstract

How do voters react when politicians implement policies that have a clear--positive or negative--impact on their personal economic situation? Our ability to answer this question is limited, because existing literature has not been able to credibly identify the effects of a policy that clearly helps or hurts voters on their attitude towards this policy and the parties responsible for implementing it. In this paper, we move the literature forward by using a large-scale field experiment in the context of a complicated property tax reform in Denmark. Using administrative registries to recruit some of those voters most affected by the reform, we inform randomly selected subsets of voters about the consequences of the tax reform and who (i.e., which political party) was responsible. Our results show that self-interest powerfully shapes voters' perception and evaluation of the policy, but that political responsibility moderates the effects on both policy support and party evaluations. These results advance our understanding of the political power of self-interest, conditions for partisan motivated reasoning and voters' attributions of responsibility.

Authors

• Martin Bisgaard, Aarhus University

• Martin Vinæs Larsen, Aarhus University

• Rune Slothuus, Aarhus University