Nudged by the Public: Social Influence Affects Citizens' Judgments on Policy Performance

EasyChair Preprint 1137

Abstract

Performance of policy implementation is an important source of information for citizens to evaluate the policy outcome and to hold government accountable. However, given increasing amounts of information disclosure and exchange by social networks, people’s evaluation and attitudes of public policies might be affected by a social influence rather than the performance information. In this study, we design a survey experiment (N =366) to investigate whether social influence effect will influence people’s attitude toward a certain policy, given the performance information available. Our findings support our hypotheses that social influence affect citizens’ policy performance perception, but it does not affect their policy support attitudes. Moreover, social influence among different social groups are not the same. These evidences suggest that citizens are not only using performance information to judge policy, and their performance perception process are much complicated than we previously assume.

Keyphrases: Performance Information, citizen attitude, policy adoption, social contagion, survey experiment

@booklet{EasyChair:1137,
  author    = {Yixin Liu and Chengxin Xu},
  title     = {Nudged by the Public: Social Influence Affects Citizens' Judgments on Policy Performance},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1137},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}