Erroneous Beliefs and Political Approval: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

43 Pages Posted: 28 Apr 2021 Last revised: 8 Jun 2023

See all articles by Matthew Lilley

Matthew Lilley

Harvard University - Department of Economics

Brian Wheaton

UCLA - Anderson School of Management

Date Written: June 7, 2023

Abstract

Are politicians rewarded for good performance, as implied by retrospective models of voting? This requires that public perceptions of performance are accurate. Examining the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, we conduct an incentivized survey asking respondents how pairs of states have performed relative to one another in terms of deaths per-capita. We compute the erroneous component of beliefs and find that it strongly drives governor approval. This result is robust to instrumenting for the erroneous component of beliefs with the level of attention focused on each state, measured by (pre-COVID) internet search volume. We also find evidence that erroneous beliefs about state performance distort social-distancing behavior, suggesting both that our measure of beliefs is accurate and that erroneous beliefs are costly to society. We replicate our findings in an identical follow-up survey later in the pandemic and in an additional survey with experimental variation.

Keywords: Political Economy, Retrospective Voting, Erroneous Beliefs, Coronavirus, COVID-19

JEL Classification: D91, D72

Suggested Citation

Lilley, Matthew and Wheaton, Brian, Erroneous Beliefs and Political Approval: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic (June 7, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3835666 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3835666

Matthew Lilley

Harvard University - Department of Economics ( email )

Littauer Center
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Brian Wheaton (Contact Author)

UCLA - Anderson School of Management ( email )

Entrepreneurs Hall C518
110 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095
United States

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