Mental Models And Political Economy

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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.