Cognitive dissonance, political participation, and changes in policy preferences

Tanja Artiga Gonzalez, Francesco Capozza, Georg Granic*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

We investigate how participation in the electoral process can causally change policy preferences drawing on the framework of cognitive dissonance theory. We present an innovative experimental design, which allows us to isolate the net effect of cognitive dissonance on preference changes. Our results suggest that cognitive dissonance created by expressing support for a losing candidate causally led participants to align their policy preferences with that of the supported candidate more closely. Our results, however, also uncovered a strong dependency of such preference changes on the outcome of the election. When supported candidates won the election, no preference change was observed. Our results may be an indication that previous studies overestimated the cognitive dissonance effect on preference changes.
Original languageEnglish
Article number102774
JournalJournal of Economic Psychology
Volume105
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2024

Bibliographical note

JEL-classification: C93, D72, D91

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