Across modern democracies, factual consensus on economic and social reality is increasingly fracturing along party lines. Traditional democratic theory assumes that public misinformation stems from an "information deficit"—a gap that education and political knowledge should naturally bridge. However, contemporary empirical evidence reveals a troubling paradox: on the most salient national issues, the widest factual divergence often occurs among the most politically informed citizens.
This panel examines the mechanisms driving the partisan capture of mass beliefs. We propose a two-regime framework for understanding public perception:
Uncontested Regimes: Issues where elite signals are muted, allowing shared folk intuitions to predominate, which education and information correct uniformly across ideological lines.
Contested Regimes: Issues where high elite conflict triggers partisan identity to displace empirical intuition. In these environments, political knowledge accelerates rather than checks partisan bias, converting factual claims into identity signals.
We invite comparative, theoretical, and empirical paper proposals—utilizing survey experiments, formal models, longitudinal tracking, or cross-national data, that explore how political beliefs are organized, updated, or manipulated.
We particularly welcome papers addressing:
Temporal & Dynamic Emergence: How issues transition from "uncontested" folk intuitions to "contested" partisan facts over time (e.g., migration, trade, energy).
Retrospective & Economic Beliefs: How macroeconomic perceptions flip dynamically with party incumbency and executive control.
Asymmetries & Content Neutrality: Whether partisan capture operates symmetrically across the political spectrum or depends on issue-congeniality.
The Frontier of Politisization: Pre-registered or experimental tests on emerging, un-politicized domains, such as public perceptions of AI-driven displacement and technological disruption.
Comparative System Dynamics: How multi-party environments, coalition signaling, and varying media ecosystems mitigate or exacerbate factual polarization compared to two-party systems.