Stephen Ansolabehere, Marc Meredith, and Erik Snowberg write:
The literature on economic voting notes that voters’ subjective evaluations of the overall state of the economy are correlated with vote choice, whereas personal economic experiences are not. Missing from this literature is a description of how voters acquire information about the general state of the economy, and how that information is used to form perceptions. In order to begin understanding this process, we [Ansolabehere, Meredith, and Snowberg] asked a series of questions on the 2006 ANES Pilot about respondents’ perceptions of the average price of gas and the unemployment rate in their home state.We fi nd that questions about gas prices and unemployment show di fferences in the sources of information about these two economic variables. Information about unemployment rates come from media sources, and are systematically biased by partisan factors. Information about gas prices, in contrast, comes only from everyday experiences.
This is no surprise, perhaps, but, still, I think this sort of work is important. The connection between economic conditions and political outcomes is hugely important, and increasingly recognized as such. But a key piece is the connection between perceptions, political ideology, and economic reality.
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I think everyday experiences confirm perceptions on unemployment, not just media. If you and all your friends are working, the media isn’t going to shake your confidence. When 3 out of 5 friends have been downsized and looking for 3 months, the media isn’t going to convince you it’s all sunshine and puppydogs.
snjmom, your friends are not anything like a representative sample for determining the unemployment rate.
I’m not saying my friends are a representative sample, I’m saying that the anecdotal evidence around a person colors their perceptions much more than the media. Sorry if I was unclear.
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