Behavioural Foundations of Elite Politics: How Individual-Level Characteristics Shape the Decision Making of Elected Politicians

What kind of decisions makers are elected politicians? Do they exhibit the same cognitive biases and choice anomalies that plague the reasoning of everyday citizens? Do they acquire some degree of expertise that makes their decision making systematically different? And what explains differences between different groups of politicians in how they confront policy problems and other in-office challenges? This dissertation consists of five papers that attempt to provide empirical answers for these questions from an individual-level behavioural perspective. These papers use evidence derived principally from in-person and online experiments conducted with hundreds of incumbent politicians and thousands of citizens in four countries. I find that politicians are equally susceptible as citizens to a series of policy-critical choice anomalies, including equivalency framing effects, the status-quo bias, escalation of commitment in face of sunk costs, and discounting future payoffs. In some cases they exhibit certain biases even more strongly than non-elites. I further document systematic differences between politicians in these domains, in ways that are directly tied to being held politically accountable and to the nature of their elected office: representatives who are more overconfident regarding their likelihood of being re-elected exhibit stronger risk-seeking behaviour; local officials who report an interest in future office-holding are strongly responsive to accountability cues, resulting in greater willingness to take risks, while those who are uninterested in re-election exhibit no behaviour change; and female and male politicians respond in opposite ways to being held publicly accountable, with men being significantly more likely to abandon policy choices presented as the status quo, and women becoming more entrenched in it. Finally, I use a formal model to analyze the implication of heterogeneity among elected officials in their capacity to engage in strategic reasoning in the context of elite frame production. Together, the papers in this dissertation provide an empirically-grounded and nuanced set of insights on elite decision making in politics that question the adequacy of numerous influential political science models and theories, which have either been relying on untested assumptions regarding elite behaviour, or have overlooked them altogether.Ph.D

Replication Data for: Electoral Confidence, Overconfidence, and Risky Behavior: Evidence From a Study With Elected Politicians

Replication materials for "Electoral Confidence, Overconfidence, and Risky Behavior: Evidence From a Study With Elected Politicians". This data set contains code and data for replicating the graphs, tables, and various analysis results reported in the paper and in the online appendix

What Explains Elite Affective Polarization? Evidence from Canadian Politicians

Affective polarization is on the rise globally, and has been associated with diminished trust in government and discrimination against out-partisans. While elected politicians are typically thought to be a major source of mass-level affective polarization, existing research has focused almost exclusively on the measurement and explanation of affective polarization among citizens. As a result, we know far less about elite affective polarization: the degree of partisan hostility held by elected politicians themselves. In this paper, we explore whether affective polarization persists among political elites even in the absence of political institutions that incentivize partisan animosity. We do so by leveraging the distinctive institutional setting of Canadian municipal politics, using an original survey of sitting local politicians to compare affective polarization between politicians and citizens and to explore, for the first time, individual-level predictors of elite affective polarization. We find that Canadian local politicians are, on average, less affectively polarized than the citizens they represent. However, levels of affective polarization among these politicians vary considerably, with higher levels of affective polarization among politicians who are ideologues, partisans, and who harbour strong progressive ambition. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for research on affective polarization and describe the need for comparative studies of affective polarization among political elites

sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612241231541 – Supplemental material for Imagined Journalists: New Framework for Studying Media–Audiences Relationship in Populist Times

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612241231541 for Imagined Journalists: New Framework for Studying Media–Audiences Relationship in Populist Times by Ayala Panievsky, Yossi David, Noam Gidron and Lior Sheffer in The International Journal of Press/Politics</p

Do Politicians Outside the United States Also Think Voters Are More Conservative than They Really Are?

In an influential recent study, Broockman and Skovron (2018) found that American politicians consistently overestimate the conservativeness of their constituents on a host of issues. Whether this conservative bias in politicians’ perceptions of public opinion is a uniquely American phenomenon is an open question with broad implications for the quality and nature of democratic representation. We investigate it in four democracies: Belgium, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland. Despite these countries having political systems that differ greatly, we document a strong and persistent conservative bias held by a majority of the 866 representatives interviewed. Our findings highlight the conservative bias in elites’ perception of public opinion as a widespread regularity and point toward a pressing need for further research on its sources and impacts