Mental Models And Political Economy

这个项目调查了经济思想、政治和公共政策之间的联系。首先，它描述了在思考经济和公共政策时使用的“心智模型”。这种描述在两个方面具有可比性：首先，它比较了各国（英国和美国；法国、德国和丹麦）的经济理念。其次，它考虑并比较公众持有的观点，民选政治家持有的观点，以及媒体对经济的介绍。然后，该项目调查了这些心理模型影响公共政策偏好和选择的方式。首先，选民的不同思维模式是否会影响他们对经济政策和政治的偏好？第二，民选官员的观点是否更能反映大众或技术层面的理解？第三，媒体在反映和连接精英和大众思想方面处于什么地位？因此，该项目解决了我们现有理解中的一个重要难题，这个难题来自于政治学发现的共存——选民“关心”经济问题，根据经济政策和感知能力选择政党，并让政府对糟糕的表现负责——以及经济社会学和经济学教育文献，即公众对经济的理解是有限的，与专家经济学家的理解大不相同。该项目的第一阶段检查了“经济如何运作”的一般心理模型，如先前在经济心理学和公众经济理解的定性账户中提出和检查的那样。更新阶段聚焦于涉及经济心智模型的三个核心政策问题：不平等、财政政策和环境。从方法论上讲，该项目在三个方面有所突破。首先，它打破了社会科学中对思想的研究与对统计证据的怀疑之间的共同联系。其次，它将解释性民族志方法和积极的政治经济学直接带入对话。最后，我们开发了新颖的文本即数据方法，允许在不同类型的证据中测量共同的想法：调查回复和媒体和采访文本。这些方法结合在一起，通过认真对待思想既是个体现象又是集体现象的论点和方法，并努力解决由此引发的实证分析问题，推动了理论议程的发展。

This project investigates the links between economic ideas, politics and public policy. First, it describes the 'mental models' used in thinking about economics and public policy. This description is comparative across two dimensions: first, it compares economic ideas across countries (the UK and USA; France, Germany and Denmark). Second, it considers and compares the ideas held by the public at large, those held by elected politicians, and the presentation of the economy in the media.The project then investigates the ways in which these mental models affect preferences and choices over public policy. First, do different mental models among voters drive preferences over economic policy and politics? Second, do the ideas held by elected officials more closely reflect popular or technical understandings? Third, what place do the media have in reflecting and linking elite and popular ideas?The project thus addresses an important puzzle in our existing understanding that emerges from the coexistence of findings in political science - that voters 'care' about economic issues, choosing parties on the basis of economic policies and perceived competence, and holding governments accountable for poor performance - and in economic sociology and the literature in economics education that public understanding of the economy is limited, and quite different from that of expert economists.The first phase of the project examines general mental models of "how the economy works" as previously proposed and examined in economic psychology and qualitative accounts of public economic understanding. The renewal phase zooms in on three central policy problems in which mental models of the economy are implicated: inequality, fiscal policy, and the environment. Methodologically, the project breaks new ground in three ways. First, it breaks the common link in social science between the study of ideas and a suspicion of statistical evidence. Second, it brings interpretive ethnographic approaches and positive political economy directly into dialogue. Finally, we develop novel text-as-data approaches to allow for the measurement of common ideas across different types of evidence: survey responses and media and interview texts. These approaches in combination push the theoretical agenda forward by taking seriously the argument and approach that ideas are both individual and collective phenomena, and grappling with the problems this raises for empirical analysis.