The Political Divide : The Case of Expectations and Preferences

The divergence of attitudes towards their ideological extremes has become an identifying feature of political markets in the United States. Little is known about its source, how large it is, whether information can attenuate it, and its causal impact on civic behavior. We design a survey experiment that allows us to identify this results from misaligned perceptions rather than differences in preferences. We randomly introduce factual information and show that it corrects these misaligned beliefs, and further use this variation to estimate its effects on a suite of outcomes. For individuals who learn the government behaves worse than preferred, they become 0.35 s.d. less supportive towards the government, believe the government is less efficient by 0.42 s.d. and are less willing to compromise and trust by 0.43 s.d. We do not find any changes for those who learn the government behaves more in line with their preferences. This asymmetric response is consistent with the literature showing that negative information has a greater impact on attitudes and beliefs than does positive information