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Biased Judgment of Political Bias: Perceived Ideological Distance Increases Perceptions of Political Bias

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Abstract

Accusations of political bias in the mass media, academia, the courts and various other institutions are common in many democracies. However, despite the prevalence of these accusations and the public attention they have received, research on the effects of perceived ideological distance on perceptions of political bias is lacking. Focusing on perceptions of political bias in academia, and drawing on a survey of 1,257 students in social science and law faculties in five Israeli universities, we show that the perceived ideological distance between a student and her set of professors increases perceptions of politically biased behavior of professors, and that the effects of ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ ideological distances are not symmetric. Possible implications and directions for further research are then suggested.

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Notes

  1. Similarly, in Israel there are allegations of political bias in the media (e.g., Gur 2010), the academy (e.g., Im Tirzu 2011; Shamir 2012) and the Supreme Court (e.g., Lis 2011).

  2. For a review on the unconsciousness of many mental biases, see Wilson and Brekke (1994).

  3. For similar claims in Israel, see Kashti (2009), Im Tirzu (2011), Halutz (2012), and Shamir (2012).

  4. For a review, see Pronin et al. (2004).

  5. These were all the universities in Israel which had such departments at the time: Bar-Ilan University, Ben-Gurion University, Haifa University, Hebrew University, and Tel-Aviv University.

  6. There were four cases in which there were two cohorts at a certain department in the same year. In these cases we treated each as a distinct cohort.

  7. The theoretical relative probabilities of inclusion are thus as follows: \({\text{P}}\left( {{\text{CI|}}\overline{\text{Refusal}} } \right) > {\text{P}}\left( {{\text{CI|partial\_refusal}}} \right) > {\text{P}}\left( {\text{CI|Refusal}} \right).\)

  8. Of the remainder, 25.8 % are second-year students, 9.5 % are third-year students, and fourth- or fifth-year students compromise 1 percent of the sample.

  9. The median age of the sample is 24, whereas the real population’s median age was 24.5. The sample’s proportion of women (61.4 %) is insignificantly different from the real population’s proportion of women (59.4 %; Z = 1.43, p < .15). Data on the student population of 2009, the most recent data available for Israeli university students, was taken from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (2013).

  10. The wording of all seven questions composing the Perceived Political Bias variable is shown in Appendix 1. We note that the construction of these seven items, in particular our sixth item, was complemented by the items suggested by Linvill and Havice (2011).

  11. It should be noted that while in most countries the policy content of principal axes of competition is the classical left–right, in Israel (and Turkey) the main policy dimension is the hawk vs. dove approach to regional conflicts and security (Benoit and Laver 2006). Still, comparative studies have shown that ideology in the Israeli context has similar psychological determinants (Jost et al. 2003) and political implications (e.g., vote choice: Bargsted and Kedar 2009; and policy preference formation: Sulitzeanu-Kenan and Halperin 2013) as in other countries.

  12. The first item was intended to extract from the student’s memory the total number of her professors, and in the second item the student could rely on her previous answer in verifying that she actually assigned all of her professors to the eight possible cells.

  13. We note that by doing so, we treat these ideologically unidentified professors as professors whom the students perceived as ideologically proximate. However, we suggest that perceptions of political bias in one’s professors are a structural experience (see above), in which all the professors the student is exposed to influence her learning experience. Therefore, since we asked students to evaluate the behaviors of all their professors, omitting these ideologically unidentified professors from our measure of perceived ideological distance could result in an incomprehensive measure of ideological distance. Nonetheless, in order to assess the robustness of our findings to this specification choice, a measure of perceived ideological distance in which the denominator was composed of the number of ideologically identified professors was included in our robustness tests. Our substantive findings were not found to be sensitive to this measurement choice. We also note that 104 out of 1,257 students did not assign a political position to any of their professors, and thus we could not calculate a Perceived Ideological Distance score for these students and they were excluded from our multivariate analyses. While this could somewhat bias our results, these students, as could have been expected, had much lower Perceived Political Bias scores (M = .12, SD = .10) than students who evaluated the ideological position of at least one of their professors (M = .27, SD = .17), (t(1,118) = 9.07, p < .001), and this, to a certain degree, supports our first hypothesis.

  14. For a simple intuitive demonstration consider a set of professors with no variation among their ideological positions, and assume that the student’s ideological position is identical. In this case the Perceived Ideological Distance measure will be zero. However, if the mean ideological position of the professors remains the same (and equal to that of the student) but their variance increases, the Perceived Ideological Distance will necessarily equal the professors’ ideological variance.

  15. Students in these 9 cohorts amounted to one quarter of the sample (316 out of 1,257), and they did not significantly differ from the other students in any of the demographic variables.

  16. All regression models in this paper were run with dummy variables for the different departments and universities, to account for the specific effect of each department and university on the dependent variables. In addition, in our questionnaire we also asked the students several other questions regarding their learning experience, and we varied the question order in our questionnaires, creating four questionnaire versions (see fn. 19 below). In order to account for the possible effect of the questionnaire versions, we also ran the models with dummy variables for each version but one.

  17. Perceived Ideological Distance and Ideological Position are correlated (r = −.56) but multicollinearity does not constitute a problem in this model as the variance inflation factor (VIF) of any regressor in the model is lower than 2.2.

  18. On this possible “projection” problem, see Malhotra and Jessee (2013).

  19. One tapping perceived political bias; another set tapping students’ fear to express political opinions in their professors’ presence; and a set of questions about students’ evaluations of their professors. Question order in the four versions is detailed in Sect. 2 of the Online Resource.

  20. Details on the randomization checks are available in Sect. 2 of the Online Resource.

  21. The detailed analysis is provided in Sect. 3 of the Online Resource.

  22. There were 51 students who perceived their overall professors’ ideological average position to be identical to their own ideological position. Omitting them from the right-gap group did not affect the result of the interaction term between Right-Gap and Perceived Ideological Distance in Model 4.

  23. Full results are available in Sect. 4 of the Online Resource.

  24. We thank two of the reviewers for suggesting these possibilities.

  25. Note that this asymmetry does not refer to the difference between right-wing and left-wing students, but rather between students who are exposed to views to the right of their positions, or to the left.

  26. For a broader discussion, see Smith et al. (2008, chapter 8). See also Hickey and Brecher (1990).

  27. Albeit correction of mental biases is for the most part an effortful process (Wilson and Brekke 1994).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a generous grant from the Max Kampelman Chair for Democracy and Human Rights. We thank Roey Reichert, who worked with the first author on a preliminary study preceding this project. We also wish to thank Pazit Ben-nun Bloom, Chanan Cohen, Avner de-Shalit, Anat Gofen, Liat Raz-Yurovich, Ilana Ritov, Tamir Sheafer, Mario Sznajder, Gadi Wolfsfeld, the editors of Political Behavior, four anonymous reviewers, members of the Cognition and Policy Research Group at the Federmann School of Public Policy and Government at the Hebrew University, members of the Politika Forum at the Hebrew University, and participants at the annual meetings of the Israeli Political Science Association and the International Society of Political Psychology.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.

Ethical standards

The authors declare that this study complied with the current laws of the country in which it was performed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, 91905, Jerusalem, Israel

    Omer Yair

  2. Department of Political Science and the Federmann School of Public Policy and Government, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel

    Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan

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  1. Omer Yair
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  2. Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan
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Appendix 1: The Wording of the Seven Perceived Political Bias Questions

Appendix 1: The Wording of the Seven Perceived Political Bias Questions

In your opinion, to what extent have the following statements been true about your studies this year in the Political Science Department? (1—Not at all; 2—To a small extent; 3—To a certain extent; 4—To a great extent; 5—To a very great extent)

  1. 1)

    Lecturers presented the learning material neutrally, appropriately relating to various political positions relating to the materials studied (reversed coded).

  2. 2)

    Lecturers expressed their personal political opinions on various political issues during the lessons.

  3. 3)

    As a course requirement, lecturers demanded reading of materials which presented only one political position.

  4. 4)

    Lecturers tried to convince students in classes they were teaching that a certain political position was more correct.

  5. 5)

    Lecturers were unwilling to hear political opinions which did not match their own.

To what extent do you agree with the following statements? (1—Definitely do not agree; 2—Do not agree; 3—Neutral; 4—Agree; 5—Definitely agree)

  1. 6)

    The lecturers with whom I studied in the Political Science Department tend to underestimate students who express different political attitudes than theirs during the lesson, in a paper or on a test.

  2. 7)

    The lecturers with whom I studied this year in the Political Science Department give lower marks to students who express different political attitudes than theirs during the lesson, in a paper or on a test.

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Yair, O., Sulitzeanu-Kenan, R. Biased Judgment of Political Bias: Perceived Ideological Distance Increases Perceptions of Political Bias. Polit Behav 37, 487–507 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-014-9278-0

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