Does evidence help politicians make informed decisions even if it is at odds with their prior beliefs? And does providing more evidence increase the likelihood that politicians will be enlightened by the information? Based on the literature on motivated political reasoning and the theory about affective tipping points, this article hypothesizes that politicians tend to reject evidence that contradicts their prior attitudes, but that increasing the amount of evidence will reduce the impact of prior attitudes and strengthen their ability to interpret the information correctly. These hypotheses are examined using randomized survey experiments with responses from 954 Danish politicians, and results from this sample are compared to responses from similar survey experiments with Danish citizens. The experimental findings strongly support the hypothesis that politicians are biased by prior attitudes when interpreting information. However, in contrast to expectations, the findings show that the impact of prior attitudes increases when more evidence is provided.

Performance data allows politicians to exert accountability over public organizations, even as ideological biases can affect how they interpret such data. However, we know little about how motivated decision-makers prioritize goals when facing multiple pieces of contradictory performance data that reflect the competing goals of public services. Such goal conflict is an inherent aspect of public management. To understand its implications for the use of performance data use we develop a theory of goal reprioritization. We start by assuming that elected officials have preferences between specific policy goals, and about governance processessuch as a preference for public or private service provision. When elected officials face contradictory pieces of performance data, governance preferences drive performance evaluations to the point that they are willing to reweight their goal preferences to minimize cognitive dissonance. We offer experimental evidence of this process, showing that elected officials asked to evaluate school performance reprioritize between two distinct policy goals for schoolstest scores and student well-beingto fit with their governance preferences. Reprioritization is an attractive strategy since it allows elected officials to claim they are using performance data, even as underlying governance preferences lead them to set aside the evaluative goal-based criteria by which they would otherwise make performance evaluations. In other words, preferences concerning the nature of government can trump goal preferences when decision-makers use performance data.

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