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The Voting Trap: Cast a Vote, Build a Bias?

From Reason magazine

Harvard’s Sendhil Mullainathan and Yale’s Ebonya Washington, in a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, examined surveys conducted from 1976 to 1996 that asked young adults about their attitudes toward a candidate two years after the candidate’s election. They discovered that those who were eligible to vote two years earlier were “twice as polarized as ineligible ones” in their opinion of the candidate. The ones who got to vote showed more approval for “their” candidate, and more disapproval for the one they didn’t vote for, than those who started with the same opinions but couldn’t vote to express them.

Yet another instance of how People Are Irrational about Politics.

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