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.

本研究提出一种简易评估方法，用以甄别哪些调查问题更易引发受政治身份影响的作答。本研究借助盖洛普（Gallup）每日调查数据，检验哪些调查自我报告更易受政治化影响，结果发现社会层面问题的政治化风险最高。与之相反，研究表明个人财务状况的自我报告评估受党派动机性作答的影响程度更低。本研究还揭示了同一调查问卷中其他题项的存在，会如何影响自我中心型经济评价。综合来看，本研究结果明确了解读经济自我报告观点的边界条件，并提出：尚未被高度政治化的民意测量指标，更适合作为反映公众潜在福祉的替代指标。