Partisan Bias, Economic Perception, and the Campaign

Quirk for comments on earlier drafts and related research. None of these parties are responsible for the arguments of, or errors in, this paper. 2 Partisan Bias, Economic Perception and the Campaign Voter perception of a diversity of politically important objects is strongly conditioned by partisanship. The claim is as old as they get in the study of political behaviour and has been replicated empirically time and again.1 Whether the focus is the personal qualities of candidates, the policy positions of parties, or even the state of the national economy, the impact of partisan commitment on perception has been found to be substantively significant, statistically robust and enduring over time. As Bartels (2002) concludes, “partisan loyalties have pervasive effects on perceptions of the political world ” (138). This is not good news for representative democracy.2 If voting decisions are to contain meaningful information about the preferences of citizens, it seems obvious that those decisions must incorporate real—or, at least, unbiased—information about politically relevant conditions. A distorted view of the political world will produce distorte