Beyond the Mean: How Thinking About The Distribution of Public Opinions Reduces Politicians' Perceptual Errors

Many studies have found that elected politicians regularly over-estimate the conser- vatism of their constituents’ preferences—a tendency that is especially pronounced among politicians on the right. While this finding is troubling, its implications depend on the magnitude and sources of so-called “conservative-overestimation,” neither of which is well-understood. In this article, we show that a novel approach to measuring politicians’ perceptions—whereby politicians draw the full distribution of their constituents’ ideological positions, rather than provide a point estimate of the overall mean—clarifies the magnitude and sources of politicians’ perceptual er- rors. This “perceived-distribution task” dramatically reduces the size of politicians’ perceptual errors. We also show that all politicians appear susceptible to conser- vative over-estimation; this bias is counterbalanced by projection effects among politicians on the left, but reinforced by projection effects among politicians on the right.