Cognitive Political Economy: A Growing Partisan Divide in Economic Perceptions

Abstract

Research suggests that American partisans are increasingly distinct in their beliefs. These strengthened partisan feelings extend to economic perceptions—as numerous scholars have shown, there is a substantial gap between the proportion of Democrats and the proportion of Republicans that believe the economy is improving. Here, we examine the extent to which these perceptions have polarized over the past two decades and the degree to which they still respond to objective economic indicators. Exploiting a Gallup time-series, we show that the gap in economic perceptions approximately doubled between 1999 and 2020, and that partisan economic perceptions no longer seem to converge during economic crises. We further demonstrate that the economic perceptions of Democrats and Republicans have polarized relative to Independents and that this polarization is not asymmetric in magnitude. Collectively, these results document the extraordinary rise of perceptual polarization and illustrate that neither Democrats nor Republicans are immune to its effects.