Why Personal Experience Isn’t Always Enough
Why Personal Experience Isn’t Always Enough
This chapter shows that the process of reputation motivated reasoning described in the previous chapter can actually result in increased support for privatizing high-quality public services. Specifically, evidence from a set of natural experiments shows that personal experience with public service provision affects whether people support privatizing that service. However, these effects are in a counterintuitive direction: someone receiving a public service that he perceives to be of very high quality mistakenly believes he is receiving a high-quality private service. As a result, he becomes more supportive of having that service turned over to a private firm.
Keywords: Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, reputation crisis, public opinion, policy feedback
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