Political polarization in retrospective economic evaluations during recessions and recoveries

•Partisan identification and ideological distance bias economic evaluations.•When unemployment rates are declining economic evaluations are polarized.•During recessions political affiliations are less predictive of economic evaluations.•Negativity bias influences the degree of polarization in the evaluation of facts.

Retrospective economic evaluations are politically biased: across a broad range of democratic countries, supporters of the party that controls the executive provide evaluations that are systematically more positive than those of the rest of the electorate; similarly, ideological distance from the ruling party predicts more negative evaluations. Yet, during economic downturns, citizens of different ideological persuasions and partisan affiliations tend to agree that the state of the economy is dire. During recoveries, on the other hand, evaluations are polarized along partisan and ideological lines. Due to the psychological phenomenon of negativity bias, retrospective evaluations respond to economic downturns more strongly than to recoveries. As a consequence, the extent of polarization in public opinion varies dramatically between good and bad economic times.