Economic Evaluations and Partisan Faultfinding: When are Respondents Most Likely to Answer Survey Questions Honestly?

This paper introduces a simple approach for assessing which survey questions are more likely to elicit political identity-influenced responses. We use daily data from Gallup to test which survey self-reports exhibit more or less susceptibility to politicization, finding the highest likelihood of politicization for societal-level questions. Conversely, we show that self-reported assessments of personal finances are less sensitive to partisan motivated responding. We also show how egotropic economic evaluations are influenced by the presence of other items on the same survey. Taken together, our results uncover scope conditions for how to interpret self-reported views of the economy, and argue that measures of public opinion which have not yet been strongly politicized are better proxies for capturing the underlying welfare of the public.