Assessing the unidimensionality of political opinions. An indirect test of the persuasion bias

摘要

In an influential paper, (DeMarzo et al., 2003) propose a modelf of persuasion bias whereby people are overly influenced by repetitive information. Such a persuasion bias leads political opinions to be unidimensional with individuals converging to a single "left-right" dimension on every issues. Using a large dataset on political opinions on a wide range of issues just before a presidential election in France, I test whether political opinions are indeed unidimensional. I find that political opinions are far from being unidimensional and I discuss what it means for the persuasion model. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V.