United in States of Dissatisfaction: Confirmation Bias Across the Partisan Divide

• Author: Daniel Acland,Amy E. Lerman
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X18799274
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Date: 01 March 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X18799274

American Politics Research

2020, Vol. 48(2) 227 –237

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X18799274

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Article

During the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump prom-

ised to fight back aggressively against government waste and

inefficiency. For instance, while experts estimated that the

candidate’s proposed tax cut would increase the size of the

debt by roughly US$10 trillion, Trump insisted much of that

amount could be mitigated by cracking down on pervasive

public mismanagement: “Department of Education. We’re

getting rid of Common Core,” he said during the campaign.

“Department of Environmental Protection. We’re going take

a tremendous amount out. The waste, fraud, and abuse is

massive.”

Coming from a Republican candidate seeking to appeal to

a particularly disaffected segment of the American elector-

ate, this sort of antigovernment rhetoric might be expected.

What is more remarkable, though, is how closely it echoes

some of the sentiments voiced by Democrats. Bernie Sanders,

who also made government dysfunction a centerpiece of his

candidacy, said during the primary campaign, “I believe in

government, but I believe in efficient government, not waste-

ful government.” Similarly, Hilary Clinton noted in a cam-

paign speech,

I would like to take a hard look at every part of the federal

government and do the kind of analysis that would rebuild some

confidence that we’re taking a hard look about what we have

and what we don’t need anymore.

In this study, we conduct a set of survey experiments

across four distinct policy domains—education, municipal

waste management, emergency medical services, and crim-

inal justice—to investigate whether Americans’ widely

held beliefs about the quality and efficiency of government

have implications for political information processing. In

some treatment conditions, we provided respondents with

clear information about the quality of a particular service.

However, we did not tell them whether that service was

administered by government or a private firm. In other con-

ditions, we provided clear information about public versus

private service provision, but provided only ambiguous

information about service quality. We find that individuals

engage in motivated reasoning to “fill in” missing informa-

tion according to their preexisting beliefs about govern-

ment. However, this bias is driven not only—or even

primarily—by party identification and ideology. In addi-

tion, effects are conditioned on respondents’ general views

of government incompetence and inefficiency.

Taken together, our findings suggest sizable limitations to

citizens’ capacity to learn about public services from new

information, and ultimately to form coherent assessments of

what government delivers. Instead, many Americans process

information in ways that simply confirm their preexisting

799274APRXXX10.1177/1532673X18799274American Politics ResearchLerman and Acland

research-article2018

1University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Amy E. Lerman, University of California, Berkeley, 2607 Hearst Ave,

Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

Email: alerman@berkeley.edu

United in States of Dissatisfaction:

Confirmation Bias Across the Partisan

Divide

Amy E. Lerman1 and Daniel Acland1

Abstract

Partisan polarization is a central feature of American political life, and a robust literature has shown that citizens engage

in partisan motivated reasoning when processing political information. At the same time, however, recent events have

highlighted a rising tide of antigovernment sentiment among Democrats and Republicans alike. Using an original set of survey

experiments, we find that citizens engage in confirmation bias when they encounter new information, and this is driven not

only by party and ideology but also by beliefs about the quality and efficiency of government. Taken together, our findings

suggest important limitations to citizens’ capacity to learn about public administration, and expand our understanding of what

drives confirmation bias with respect to public and private service provision.

Keywords

confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, privatization, trust in government