Systematic Misinformation About Responsibility

I think public ignorance about political facts probably isn't that big a problem. But I worry more about the idea that people don't know who's in charge of what. Feelings about George W Bush and Barack Obama seem to drive state legislative elections and my intuition is that people don't realize how small a role the federal government plays in education policy.

Bryan Caplan uses survey data to test this theory and finds that it's quite true:

Systematically biased attributional beliefs turn out to be common and large. Fully 14 out of 16 survey questions exhibit statistically significant biases. Compared to experts in American politics, the public greatly overestimates the influence of state and local governments on the economy, the president and Congress on the quality of public education, the Federal Reserve on the budget, Congress on the Iraq War, and the Supreme Court on crime rates. The public also moderately underestimates the influence of the Federal Reserve on the economy, state and local governments on public education, and the president and Congress on the budget. While we are open to the possibility that non-cognitive factors explain observed belief gaps, controlling for demographics and various measures of self-serving and ideological bias does little to alter our results. A full set of controls reduces the absolute magnitude of the raw belief gaps by less than 13% – and leaves the number of statistically significant lay-expert differences unchanged.

There's a lot you could say about this, but for starters I think the political media could do a little soul-searching over this. It seems to me that the news stories I read about presidential campaigns and clashes in congress very much engage in these errors. People routinely cover state politicians' proclamations about economic growth strategy without noting state government's relative impotence in this area, the Fed is invariably slighted in stories about political fights over the national economy, editors' story selection choices give a very misleading view of what kinds of issues the Supreme Court decides, etc.