2025/10/27 by Matthew Graham · 1 voice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Non-response bias #Panel data #Perception #Political and Economic history of UK and US #Presidential system #Quarter (Canadian coin) #Recession #Survey data collection #Unemployment
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/xps.2025.10023
published in Journal of Experimental Political Science, 1-14 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 2025/10/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract The partisan gap in economic perceptions flipped unusually dramatically after the 2024 U.S. presidential election: following the Republican victory, Democrats (Republicans) suddenly rated the economy much more negatively (positively). Was the resulting partisan difference a case of expressive responding, wherein surveys exaggerate partisan bias in measures of economic perceptions? In April 2025, I fielded a panel survey experiment that asked survey respondents to guess then-unpublished measures of economic growth, inflation, and unemployment in the current month or quarter (Prolific, N = 2,831). Randomly selected respondents were offered 2 per correct answer. Partisan bias did not shrink as a result, suggesting genuine differences in economic perceptions. Two measures of response effort (response time and looking up answers) increase, suggesting that misreporting does not fully explain the effects of pay-for-correct treatments.