With co-authors Kayla Hamann '22, Jennifer Lee '22, Gabrielle Levy '22, and Victor Wu '22, Dartmouth Professor of Government Brendan Nyhan recently published, "Republicans Are More Optimistic about Economic Mobility, but No Less Accurate" in Research & Politics. Matt Grossman, of the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University, was a co-author of the article as well.
The four Dartmouth students who helped write this article were James O. Freedman Presidential Scholars supported by Dartmouth Undergraduate Advising and Research. The students started working with Professors Grossman and Nyhan in the summer of 2020 and continued spring 2021. They took the lead on both the data analysis and writing of the article, successfully dealing with all the challenges posed by remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of the four, Victor Wu '22 is triple-majoring in Quantitative Social Science, Environmental Studies, and Government. Victor joined the research project because Professor Nyhan's course on political misinformation piqued his interest in research on partisan misperceptions. Victor's student co-authors are majoring in a mixture of Government and Mathematical Data Science.
The Nyhan et al. article represents a key tenet of the Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS), on whose steering committee Professor Nyhan serves. The program's curriculum emphasizes the importance of research, and all students working in it must complete independent one-quarter research projects in their last year on campus or write honors theses. Victor will be completing his project in Winter 2022.
The abstract of the article is as follows:
Do Americans overestimate economic mobility? Using representative surveys of the public and local government officials, we assess claims of widespread misperceptions about economic mobility by measuring the accuracy of participants' perceptions of both relative and absolute mobility. Republican members of the public and government officials are more optimistic than are Democrats about poor children's chances of reaching the highest income quintile (relative mobility) and earning more than their parents (absolute mobility). Democrats also rate race and family wealth as more important to children's chances than do Republicans. However, partisan tendencies to overestimate or underestimate mobility are roughly symmetric despite differences in optimism; we only observe small and inconsistent differences in belief accuracy by party for both the public and local officials. Finally, accuracy is no greater for perceptions of state and local mobility than at the national level.