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Do Surveys Provide Representative or Whimsical Assessments of the Economy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Harvey D. Palmer  and
Raymond M. Duch
Harvey D. Palmer
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-1848 hpalmer@olemiss.edu
Raymond M. Duch
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77204-3474 Rduch@uh.edu
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Abstract

We argue that survey responses to economic evaluation questions exhibit instability and can be affected by fairly trivial changes in questionnaire wording. Our analyses make three empirical contributions to this area of survey research. First, we demonstrate that within the course of the interview there is considerable instability in economic evaluations. Second, one source of this instability is cues regarding economic performance, such as those provided by the media. We find that respondents can be persuaded to change their economic evaluations if they receive contradictory cues. Finally, we demonstrate that question placement can affect economic evaluations. More specifically, we demonstrate that proximity to political questions can contaminate economic evaluations. If economic evaluations closely follow political preference questions, respondents have a tendency to give economic responses that are “consistent” with their political responses. Our empirical analysis is based on economic evaluations of respondents to the Hungarian Markets and Democracy Survey administered during December 1997.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , 2001 , pp. 58 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the Society for Political Methodology 

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