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- Appendix B Survey Details—Not for Publication The typical way psychologists measure overconfidence is not well suited to surveys. They often use a very large number of questions—up to 150 (see, for example, Alpert and Raiffa, 1969/1982; Soll and Klayman, 2004)—and elicit confidence using confidence intervals, which may be difficult for the average survey respondent to understand (see, for example, Juslin Appendix–10 et al., 1999; Rothschild, 2011).
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- Appendix–18 Figure 5: Men became significantly more conservative after 1980. Cutpoint −2 0 2 4 6
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- Appendix–20 The results in Table C.1 are broadly consistent with the patterns predicted by Proposition 3 and Proposition C.1. For self-reported ideology, there is no statistical difference in average ideology between men and women before 1982, and, consistent with Proposition C.1, men are equally more ideologically extreme, regardless of their ideological direction. After 1982, men are significantly further to the right then women on average, and, consistent with Proposition 3, being male exhibits greater correlation with ideological extremeness for those to the right of the population median than for those to the left of the median.2 For the thermometer scores, the difference in correlation between right and left expands as the ideological difference between men and women increases.
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- Regret Avoidance: Matsusaka (1995) argues that voter turnout is driven in part by whether citizens anticipate they will regret their vote. We view this theory as descriptively accurate: indeed, we ran a survey on a convenience sample using Mechanical Turk, and found that over 60% of respondents reported that they took into account whether they might regret their vote when deciding whether or not to vote. Almost 40% could name someone they regretted voting for.1 1
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- This has been shown to reduce the number of incorrect answers simply due to a respondent not knowing the appropriate scale (Ansolabehere et al., 2013). Second, confidence is elicited on a qualitative scale, which is easily understandably by survey respondents and allows for more conservative controls for actual knowledge.
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- While any political economy model where turnout is exogenous implicitly uses an expressive voting model (and others use it more explicitly, see Knight, 2013), there are a number of other approaches in the political economy literature. As each approach has its partisans, we thought it worthwhile to discuss those models, and show, where possible, how our model relates to them.
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