Cognitive Political Economy: A Growing Partisan Divide in Economic Perceptions

• Date: 01 January 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211032107
• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Author: John A. Ferejohn,David W. Brady,Brett Parker
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211032107

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Gerber and Green (1999) asserted that partisanship did not

appear to significantly impact beliefs about the economy,

concluding that “[b]eliefs and evaluations do change by

approximately the same degree among those with different

political allegiances” (p. 205). Specifically, they point to

their own 1997 piece, in which their analyses of survey data

showed “Democrats, Republicans and Independents moved

together in their evaluation of which party was best able to

handle the nation’s economy” (pp. 206–207).

Gerber and Green’s earlier view has since been ques-

tioned (including by Gerber himself). In 2002, Larry Bartels

made the case to the contrary explicit, arguing that party

identification is a “pervasive dynamic force in shaping

citizens’ perceptions of and reaction to the political world”

(p. 119). Using data that tracked opinions of George H.W.

Bush’s handling of the U.S. economy prior to his reelection

bid, as well as evaluations of economic phenomena during

the Reagan years, he demonstrated that partisans in fact

appear to filter information about the economy differently.

He concluded that partisan biases in political and eco-

nomic perceptions played an important role in maintaining

and reinforcing sharp differences between Democrats and

Republicans.

In the years following Bartels’ article, political scientists

have devoted extensive attention to the consequences of par-

tisanship (e.g., Bisgaard, 2015; Iyengar & Westwood, 2014).

In particular, they have continued to comment on the distinc-

tive ways in which partisans perceive the economy. As

Bartels indicated, partisanship is thought to produce biases in

these perceptions; in the last 20 years, a consensus has

emerged among scholars that partisans are comparatively

more optimistic about the economy when their party controls

the executive branch than they are otherwise (Bartels, 2002;

Erikson, 2004; Gerber & Huber, 2009). Similarly, research

has found that a sudden shift in partisan control of Congress

can produce changes in the economic attitudes of partisans

(Gerber & Huber, 2010).

To this point, however, academics in the field have

focused primarily on demonstrating the existence of parti-

san differences in economic perceptions. Efforts toward

determining how the size of those differences has changed

in recent years and uncovering the causes of this perceptual

polarization have been more limited. This gap in the litera-

ture is puzzling. A surface level glance at partisan economic

perceptions suggests that they have grown markedly over

the past 20 years, and have become an increasingly salient

political phenomenon. As Figure 1a to d indicate, partisan

differences in economic perceptions have increased from

about 20 percentage-points at the beginning of the Bush II

Administration to a maximum of 73 percentage-points dur-

ing the Trump administration. Moreover, the perceptions of

1032107APRXXX10.1177/1532673X211032107American Politics ResearchBrady et al.

research-article2021

1Stanford University, CA, USA

2New York University School of Law, USA

Corresponding Author:

Brett Parker, Stanford University, 531 Lasuen Mall, P.O. Box 12496,

Stanford, CA 94309, USA.

Email: bparker2@stanford.edu

Cognitive Political Economy: A Growing

Partisan Divide in Economic Perceptions

David W. Brady1, John A. Ferejohn2, and Brett Parker1

Abstract

Research suggests that American partisans are increasingly distinct in their beliefs. These strengthened partisan feelings

extend to economic perceptions—as numerous scholars have shown, there is a substantial gap between the proportion

of Democrats and the proportion of Republicans that believe the economy is improving. Here, we examine the extent to

which these perceptions have polarized over the past two decades and the degree to which they still respond to objective

economic indicators. Exploiting a Gallup time-series, we show that the gap in economic perceptions approximately doubled

between 1999 and 2020, and that partisan economic perceptions no longer seem to converge during economic crises. We

further demonstrate that the economic perceptions of Democrats and Republicans have polarized relative to Independents

and that this polarization is not asymmetric in magnitude. Collectively, these results document the extraordinary rise of

perceptual polarization and illustrate that neither Democrats nor Republicans are immune to its effects.

Keywords

polarization, public opinion, economic perceptions, perceptual bias, economic crises

2022, Vol. 50(1) 3 –16