Periodic Reporting for period 3 - POPULIZATION (Behavioral Foundations of Populism and Polarization)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-02-01 bis 2024-07-31
Since the Great Recession of 2008, populist or openly Eurosceptic parties – such as the Front National, Syriza, Golden Dawn, the Five Star Movement, the Northern League, Podemos, Jobbik, Law and Justice, the UK Independence Party, or the Party for Freedom – have scored major electoral successes around Europe and the developed world. The aim of this project is to investigate this phenomenon with the lenses of behavioral political economy, a blossoming field at the intersection of behavioral economics and political economy, which applies insights from cognitive psychology and methodological tools from microeconomics to understand the causes and consequences of political behavior. The project pushes this research frontier forward by addressing two fundamental issues that can shed light on the puzzling pattern of support for populism: the heterogeneity and time (in)stability of preferences and cognitive abilities; and the role of limited attention in shaping preferences and information processing. In particular, this project has two ambitious goals. The first major goal is to understand citizens’ economic preferences, social preferences and cognitive abilities, how they vary over space and time, and how they affect political behavior and the support for populist policies. The key novelty of my approach is to collect empirical evidence from representative samples of European citizens and to combine large surveys with state-of-the-art techniques from experimental and behavioral economics. The second major goal is to understand how politicians’ incentives are affected by the cognitive abilities and unstable preferences of their electorate, and how this matters for the supply of populist policies. The key novelty of my approach is to introduce a fundamental lesson from cognitive psychology in theoretical models of politics: voters have limited attention, think in context and the environment in which they operate influences their preferences and beliefs
I completed and published in top political science (American Journal of Political Science) and economics (Games and Economic Behavior) journals 2 papers: "Positive Spillovers from Negative Campaigning" (coauthored with Vincenzo Galasso and Tommaso Nannicini) and “Dynamic Legislative Bargaining with Veto Power: Theory and Experiments”. The published version of these two articles (including the data and the replication material) is open acccess. I completed, submitted for publication, and presented at seminars and conferences 5 working papers: "Cognitive Imprecision and Strategic Behavior" (coautored with Cary Frydman), "Meta-Analysis of Inequality Aversion Estimates" (coauthored with Massimiliano Pozzi), "A Model of Focusing in Political Choice" (coauthored with Jan Zapal), "Democratic Accountability with Reciprocal Voters", and "Audi Alteram Partem: An Experiment on Selective Exposure to Information" (coauthored with Giovanni Montanari). I trained 2 young researchers after they completed their Master or PhD and before they continued their carreers, respectively, with a Pre-Doc or a position as Assistant Professor. I developed and tested an online questionnaire to measure a number of economic, social and political preferences in representative samples of European populations. The questionnaire is now ready to be translated in the various languages so that the survey can be administered and the data collection completed by the end of the project. I have also provided many public goods to the broad community of students and researchers in the social sciences: between May 2020 and May 2022, I co-organized VIBES, the Virtual Behavioral Economics Seminar; I developed and made available online a series of lectures on “Structural Behavioral Economics with Python and Julia”; and I assembled, mantained and made available online a “Database of Laboratory Experiments in Top Economics Journals”.
The project has already pushed the research frontier forward thanks to the development and experimental test of theoretical models which leverage insights from the cognitive sciences and explore the role of limited attention and of cognitive noise in shaping individuals’ preferences and information processing. Moreover, at the light of the progress made so far, I expect that, by the end of the project, I will have collected a large dataset with reliable and fine-grained measures of economic preferences, social preferences, and political behavior from a sample representative of the general population of European countries. This dataset, together with the hypotheses from the theoretical models that I have developed and will continue to develop during the rest of the project, will enable me to tackle the goals of the project, that is, to shed new light on the origin and dynamics of the demand for populism as well as of the geographical and temporal patters in (ideological and affective) polarization.