Chris Blattman

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Behavioral politics

I have been waiting for a flood of studies applying some of the innovations in behavioral economics and psychology (i.e. Kahneman) to political science. Maybe I have missed it.

There is this, however:

This paper studies the role of overcon dence in political behavior. We posit a simple model of overcon dence in beliefs. The model predicts that overcon dence leads to ideological extremeness, increased voter turnout, and increased strength of partisan identi fication. Moreover, the model makes many nuanced predictions about the patterns of ideology in society, and over a person’s lifetime. We test these predictions using novel survey data that allows for the measurement of overconfi dence, and find that the predicted relationships are statistically and substantively important.

A new paper by Ortoleva and Snowberg.

5 Responses

  1. FYI, for some reason its reading as “overcon dence” in the quoted blurb. I almost sheepishly googled the term before realizing that an “f” was missing.

  2. Yeah, Todd did a lot of work on this with the Analyst Institute. However, much of it was for candidates and not published. Check out Sasha Issenberg’s “The Victory Lab” for a summary,

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