Social Econ Blog

The country doesn’t just display remarkable difference in beliefs about religious things like the devil; beliefs about foreign policy related facts also differ significantly across space. For example, a CBS/New York Times poll of April 2004 asked respondents, “Do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center?” Of the South Central region respondents (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico), 45 percent said yes to this question, but only 25 percent of the Pacific Southwest respondents (California, Nevada, Arizona, and Hawaii) shared this belief. In the same poll, 60 percent of the South Central region respondents and 62 percent of the Mountains and Plains respondents (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota) said that they think that “Iraq probably does have weapons of mass destruction that the United States has not found yet?” Only 43 percent of the Pacific Southwest and 40 percent of the Pacific Northwest respondents (Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho) shared this view.

These differences in beliefs within the United States drive home a central point about how politically relevant beliefs are formed. People in different states have been exposed to quite similar evidence through national media outlets, but they have come to radically different conclusions, and continue to hold these conclusions despite being aware that others disagree. This disagreement requires either different prior beliefs or some other deviation from Bayesian reasoning. One natural alternative model is that people base opinions mostly on the views of those around them. As such, local interactions are critical, and these provide plenty of possibility for wide geographic variation (as in Glaeser, Sacerdote and Scheinkman, 1996; Murphy and Shleifer, 2004).