IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/uunewp/2009_012.html

Correcting Mistakes: Cognitive Dissonance and Political Attitudes in Sweden and the United States

Author

Listed:
  • Elinder, Mikael

    (Department of Economics)

Abstract

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting makes people more positive toward the party or candidate they have voted for. Following Mullainathan and Washington (2009), I test this prediction by using exogenous variation in turnout provided by the voting age restriction. I improve on previous studies by investigating political attitudes, measured just before elections, when they are highly predictive of voting. In contrast to earlier studies I find no effect of voting on political attitudes. This result holds for a variety of political attitudes and for both Sweden and the United States.

Suggested Citation

  • Elinder, Mikael, 2009. "Correcting Mistakes: Cognitive Dissonance and Political Attitudes in Sweden and the United States," Working Paper Series 2009:12, Uppsala University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:uunewp:2009_012
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:225798/FULLTEXT01.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Artiga González, Tanja & Capozza, Francesco & Granic, Georg D., 2024. "Cognitive dissonance, political participation, and changes in policy preferences," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 105(C).
    2. Lars Hall & Thomas Strandberg & Philip Pärnamets & Andreas Lind & Betty Tärning & Petter Johansson, 2013. "How the Polls Can Be Both Spot On and Dead Wrong: Using Choice Blindness to Shift Political Attitudes and Voter Intentions," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(4), pages 1-6, April.
    3. Romain Espinosa & Jan Stoop, 2021. "Do people really want to be informed? Ex-ante evaluations of information-campaign effectiveness," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 24(4), pages 1131-1155, December.
    4. Emilio Ocampo, 2019. "The Economic Analysis of Populism. A Selective Review of the Literature," CEMA Working Papers: Serie Documentos de Trabajo. 694, Universidad del CEMA.
    5. Libman, Alexander & Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten & Yadav, Gaurav, 2013. "Are human rights and economic well-being substitutes? The evidence from migration patterns across the Indian states," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 139-164.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • B59 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Current Heterodox Approaches - - - Other
    • C21 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:uunewp:2009_012. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ulrika Öjdeby (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nekuuse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.