SOCIOECONOMIC POLICY EVALUATION: PARTISANSHIP AND PARTISAN BIAS EFFECT

Abstract

Public support of socioeconomic reforms is one of the most important factors for their successful implementation, and conversely, lack of public approval doesn’t allow achieving the expected effect and may result in negative externalities. In this regard, it is relevant to study the origins of people’s opinions and factors affecting their evaluation of social and economic policies. This paper is devoted to the following aspects of this multidimensional problem as partisanship and partisan bias. Their research has been actively promoted by foreign scientists, but so far presented extremely limited in Ukrainian literature. In this paper the critical review of foreign scientific papers devoted to this topic is presented; the main hypotheses about the influence of party identification on public opinion and the effect of partisan bias are highlighted; features of the methodology are noted and research results are summarized. The methodology used by foreign specialists for research of this problem is based on experimental methods, among them the main place belongs to laboratory experiments. A laboratory experiment means observing people’s behavior (participants’ behavior) under strictly controlled conditions when the influence of uncontrolled factors is limited to a minimum. In foreign studies of partisan bias and its influence on citizens' evaluation of socioeconomic policies, laboratory experiments serve as the main tool for testing hypotheses. The results of the research give evidence, on the one hand, that the partisan bias mechanism provides wide possibilities to manipulate the people’s opinion and public opinion in general, on the other hand, that correct objective information about the policy content and goals can significantly weaken the partisan bias effect. Foreign studies prove that party signal influence depends on the people’s properties, policy content, political systems, and party characteristics. In Ukraine, there is a lack its own research in this field, however, as democratic institutions, civil society, and people’s political consciousness and activity develop, these studies become more relevant to the political and economic life in Ukrainian society.