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”。这种描述有三个重要的比较要素：首先，它比较了各国（英国、美国、法国、德国和丹麦）的经济思想。其次，它考虑并比较了公众和精英所持有的观点。第三，分析了经济在媒体中的呈现。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，再次考虑了精英和大众的水平。首先，精英和公众心智地图的差异会导致反建制政治吗？第二，不同的心智模式能解释人们对新信息的反应吗？他们对经济政策和政治（投票选择）的偏好有影响吗？在精英阶层，对经济运行方式的不同理解能否解释不同政策选择之间的选择？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。在方法上，拟议的研究将在打破社会科学中思想研究和对统计证据的怀疑之间的共同联系方面开辟新天地。它还通过认真对待思想是个体的、也是集体的现象的论点和方法，推动了理论议程的发展。它将使用具有全国代表性的调查来描述五个比较案例国家中不同模型的流行程度，并使用实验设计来建立特定“心理模型”与政策偏好之间的因果关系。在精英方面，将使用访谈和文本分析来描述决策者持有并在媒体上呈现的心理模型。该项目的最后一部分侧重于将研究结果发展为公共话语和经济和政治传播工具的创新。鉴于当代对精英和“专家”态度之间脱节的担忧，改善这些沟通渠道对于提高有关经济的公共辩论质量至关重要。

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 has three important comparative elements: first, it compares economic ideas across countries (the UK, USA, France, Germany and Denmark). Second, it considers and compares the ideas held by the public at large, and those held by elites. Third, it analyses 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, again considering both the elite and popular level. First, do differences in the mental maps held by elites and the public lead to anti-establishment politics? Second, do different mental models explain how people respond to new information? Do they drive preferences over economic policy and politics (vote choices)? At the elite level, can different understandings of how the economy work explain choices between different policy options?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.Methodologically, the proposed research will break new ground in breaking the common link in social science between the study of ideas and a suspicion of statistical evidence. It also pushes the theoretical agenda forward by taking seriously the argument and approach that ideas are individual, as well as collective, phenomena. It will use nationally representative surveys to describe the prevalence of different models in five comparative case countries, and use experimental designs to establish the causal links between particular 'mental models' and policy preferences. On the elite side, interviews and text analysis will be used to describe the mental models held by policy-makers and presented in the media.The final strand of the project focuses on developing the findings of the research into innovations in public discourse and tools for economic and political communication. Given contemporary concern about the disconnect between elite, 'expert' attitudes, improving these channels of communication is imperative for better quality public debate on the economy.