Date:
Location:
Today's Speaker
Charles Angelucci (MIT), "Beliefs About Political News in the Run-up to an Election" (w/Michel Gutmann and Andrea Prat)
Abstract
We use a large-scale news knowledge survey conducted just before the 2020 US presidential election, alongside monthly survey data, to explore how partisan differences in political news beliefs evolve. We exploit questions repeated in multiple surveys to identify changes in beliefs about the same news stories as the election approaches. Our findings indicate that partisan bias intensifies two to threefold during election periods. Within a framework of motivated beliefs, this change in partisan bias is predominantly driven by an amplification of the partisan identity effect, rather than differences in partisan recall. We also present findings from a counterfactual analysis that assesses the impact of a hypothetical targeted misinformation campaign during and outside of elections.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
Zoom links for the Alesina Seminar are distributed via the seminar's mailing list. You can subscribe to the Alesina Seminar Mailing List here.
See the seminar's full schedule at the Alesina Seminar page.
All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.