Someone like you: false consensus in perceptions of Democrats and Republicans

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I demonstrate false consensus in Americans' perceptions of ordinary party members: the more a person agrees with a statement, the more they believe that in-party members would also agree. I find traces of false consensus for the out-party as well. This pattern in perceptions of ordinary partisans is very similar to the pattern I find in perceptions of politicians' positions. This suggests that false consensus is closely related to another phenomenon in political perceptions: assimilation. I also show that Americans’ perceptions of their in-parties are more correlated with their own opinions than with reality. The results have implications for our understanding of affective polarization, of real-world cueing effects, and of representation.

KEYWORDS:

• political perception
• social identity
• false consensus
• assimilation
• partisanship

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab for its support in collecting the nationally diverse survey data. The author would also like to thank David Broockman for publicly sharing his polling data of citizen and elite opinions. Both studies in this paper were approved by COUHES, the Institutional Review Board at MIT.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This survey was part of an experiment about cueing effects. After confirming that there were no spillover effects of the cue treatment on other policies, I simply dropped the treated policy for each respondent.