Economic Conditions and Party Competence: Processes of Belief Revision

This paper focuses on the processes by which people revise their beliefs about the abilities of political parties to handle national economic problems. According to the “intuitive statistician” model, such beliefs are highly responsive to new information. However, the “cognitive miser” model views beliefs as highly resistant to change. We attempt to integrate these two models and to test the integrated model, using data drawn from a three-wave panel survey. The results are generally most consistent with the “cognitive miser” portions of the model.