The Negativity Bias and The Effect of Policy Change on Evaluations of Political Incumbents.

Psychological research finds robust and pervasive evidence that negative stimuli tend to have a greater impact on individuals than do positive stimuli. This paper seeks to incorporate this cognitive trait into our understanding of retrospective voting. While scholars have found evidence of such an asymmetry in macro-level studies of economic voting, survey based studies tend to conclude the opposite - that individuals exhibit no 'negativity bias' in responses to economic conditions. This paper experimentally tests whether citizens respond to incumbent actions in an asymmetrical fashion. In the experiments, subjects were randomly assigned to treatment conditions which received either negative, positive, or neutral information about a specific policy change occurring during an incumbent's term in office and asked to evaluate the incumbent. Results from the experiment suggest citizens do indeed respond asymmetrically to objectively equivalent positive and negative policy changes but that this asymmetry is more a product of citizens' expectations of elected officials than an inherent negativity bias in information processing. Results also suggest that responses to positive and negative policy information are moderated by the quality of the prior policy status quo and generally unaffected by partisanship. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]