ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Eliciting preferences for truth-telling in a survey of politicians.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Deception Detection in Politics: Can Voters Tell When Politicians are Lying?Political behavior · 2023Article
- Are dishonest politicians more likely to be reelected? A Bayesian view.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Reply to Verschuere et al.: On prior choice and effect size.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Eliciting preferences for truth-telling in a survey of politicians.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
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2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Honesty is one of the most valued traits in politicians. Yet, because lies often remain undiscovered, it is difficult to study if some politicians are more honest than others. This paper examines which individual characteristics are correlated with truth-telling in a controlled setting in a large sample of politicians. We designed and embedded a game that incentivizes lying with a nonmonetary method in a survey answered by 816 Spanish mayors. Mayors were first asked how interested they were in obtaining a detailed report about the survey results, and at the end of the survey, they had to flip a coin to find out whether they would be sent the report. Because the probability of heads is known, we can estimate the proportion of mayors who lied to obtain the report. We find that a large and statistically significant proportion of mayors lied. Mayors that are members of the two major political parties lied significantly more. We further find that women and men were equally likely to lie. Finally, we find a negative relationship between truth-telling and reelection in the next municipal elections, which suggests that dishonesty might help politicians survive in office.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.