Partisan bias in public perception of elections polls: experimental evidence from Mexico

While most of the literature on public opinion has explored how motivated reasoning makes some individuals discredit survey results in advanced industrial democracies like the U.S., few studies have considered how voters perceive electoral polling in young democracies like Mexico. This study included a survey experiment that found that voters perceived polls that matched their partisan preferences as more credible. Moreover, voters were requested to provide an estimate of candidates’ vote intention. The results highlight that voters’ partisan bias – not lack of information, prior expectations or low levels of interest – makes them overestimate their co-partisan candidate’s vote intention. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the conditions that make some voters interpret political events through a partisan lens. Voters choose interpretations that rationalize their partisan predispositions even in young democracies, where partisanship is commonly perceived to be weak.