Biased Perceptions: Social Identity and Evaluations of National and International COVID-19 Pandemic Performance

Many voters hold misperceptions about their country's performance on important outcomes. One reason is that individuals with a social identity are motivated to view the world in a way that reflects well on their group. This bias can become salient in the political sphere. For example, committed partisans tend to view the economy more positively when their party is in power. In this paper, I expand scholarship on the perceptual bias caused by social identities by considering whether party and Brexit identities shaped perceptions of how countries performed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using British Election Study panel data, which includes high quality measures of social identification, I show that both party and Brexit identity were associated with how well the UK performed during the pandemic. Those individuals who were closer to the government end of the party identity scale were more positive about the UK's performance. Those individuals who were closer to the Leave end of the Brexit identity scale were also more positive about the UK's performance and, additionally, were more negative about the performance of other countries. This latter result provides a novel contribution to the literature on perceptual bias by showing that social identities can bias the perception of international, as well as national, outcomes.