How do legislators’ occupational backgrounds shape their ability to advance unpopular policies? We argue that politicians with professional experience are perceived as more credible in their areas of expertise and can more effectively persuade voters and peers. We examine this argument in a series of experiments in three Western democracies. We find that German legislators with occupational experience in education are more effective at persuading voters in that policy area. The same pattern holds for United States’ legislators with experience in healthcare. The quality of the arguments does not substitute for having actual occupational experience. These effects extend to elected officials: Swedish politicians are more likely to co-sign motions proposed by peers with relevant expertise. Overall, parties that foster occupational diversity are better equipped to build support for their policy agendas. The study uncovers a new mechanism through which descriptive representation can influence policy outcomes, independent of legislators’ preferences.

A key challenge when surveying political elites is recruitment. Low response rates can lead to biased samples and underpowered designs, threatening the validity of descriptive and experimental scholarship. In a randomized control trial, we test the effects of sending postal invitations in a large survey of local elected officials. We find that German and UK local politicians are more likely to complete the survey if invited by postal mail, rather than simply by email. Recruitment mode does not impact the quality of responses but shapes the population of local officials recruited. Officials invited via postal letter were more likely to come from smaller municipalities and less likely to have a college degree. Costs per response are relatively high but can be reduced as we learn more about selection into elite surveys.

While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theoretical beliefs about how elections and voting work. Here, we investigate politicians’ positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behaviour and compare politicians’ theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly 1,000 politicians in eleven countries, together with corresponding surveys of more than 12,000 ordinary citizens, we show that politicians overwhelmingly hold thin, minimalist, “democratic realist” theories of voting, while citizens’ theories are more optimistic and policy-oriented. Politicians’ theoretical tendencies – along with their theoretical misalignment with citizens – are remarkably consistent across countries. These theoretical beliefs are likely to have important consequences for how politicians campaign, communicate with the public, think about public policy, and represent their constituents.

Local governments play an important role in addressing the climate crisis. However, despite public support for climate action, local policy responses have been limited. We argue that (1) biased beliefs about voter preferences, (2) the time horizon for credit claiming, and (3) source credibility are barriers for legislators to learn and adopt new environmental policies. We test these arguments in a real policy-learning context. Representatives from six Western countries received customized invitations to a webinar on climate solutions for local governments. We find that constituency opinion on climate issues made local office-holders more responsive to public preferences. Invitations sent by a climate scientist and emphasizing shorter-term policy effects increased interest in the webinar, but did not boost the likelihood of policy commitments. Only US officials responded negatively to climate scientists. The results reveal concrete steps to induce climate action and contribute to scholarship on policy learning.

Political parties increasingly rely on self-regulation efforts to promote ethical standards in office. But how effective are such initiatives? We argue that the ability of ethics self-regulation to induce sustained change is a function of the responses from politicians and voters. Without external enforcement mechanisms, acquiescence from elected officials is crucial for the success of such reforms. In turn, if voters perceive self-regulation as cheap talk, reelection-seeking officials have fewer incentives to comply. We explore these questions in a paired conjoint experiment with elected officials and voters in Portugal and Spain. The results show that political elites support (and voters reward) financial disclosures, lobbying registries, and sanctions for MPs involved in corruption cases. Voters also reward term limits in party lists. The results reveal concrete steps that parties can take to raise ethical and transparency standards in public office.

Prior work shows that women are, on average, more risk averse than men. This evidence has been used to theorize about gender differences in elite behavior. However, whether differences in risk aversion hold among the subset of citizens willing to run for office remains an open question. We report a pre-registered experiment with parliamentary candidates in Portugal and find that women candidates are less risk averse than men candidates. This effect is driven by risk preferences in public investments and is not explained by gender differences in political experience. The findings are consistent with a process of gendered (self-)selection where women risk-takers are disproportionately attracted to enter a men-dominated career and run for office. Despite requiring future validation in different contexts, the evidence highlights the challenges of extrapolating from citizen samples to study elite behavior and suggests that risk perceptions are a relevant supply-side determinant of women representation.

Pepinsky, Goodman, and Ziller (PGZ; 2023) reassess a recent study on the long-term consequences of concentration camps in Germany (Homola, Pereira, and Tavits 2020a). The authors conclude that accounting for contemporary state heterogeneity in the models provides unbiased estimates of the effects of camps on current-day outgroup intolerance. In this note we show that PGZ’s empirical strategy rests on (a) a mischaracterization of what regional fixed effects capture and (b) two unrealistic assumptions that can be avoided with pre-treatment state fixed effects. We further demonstrate that results from the original article remain substantively the same when we incorporate regional fixed effects correctly. Finally, simulations reveal that camp proximity consistently outperforms spatially correlated noise in this specific study. The note contributes to the growing literature on legacy studies by advancing the discussion about the correct modeling choices in this challenging field.

We argue that policy expertise constrains the ability of politicians to act on voter preferences. Legislators with more knowledge and experience in a given domain have more confidence in their own issue-specific positions. Enhanced confidence, in turn, may lead legislators to discount opinions they disagree with, producing a distorted image of the electorate. Two experiments with Swedish politicians support our argument. First, we find that officials are more likely to dismiss appeals from voters in their areas of expertise, and less likely to accept that opposing views may represent the majority opinion. Consistent with the proposed mechanism, in a second experiment we show that inducing perceptions of expertise increases self-confidence. The results suggest that representatives with more specialized knowledge in a given area may be less capable of acting as delegates in that domain. The study provides a novel explanation for variations in policy responsiveness.

Previous studies uncovered a negative relationship between the proportion of women in public office and corruption. These findings have inspired anti-corruption programs around the world. It remains unclear, however, whether there is a causal link between the share of women in office and malfeasance. For instance, gender differences in political experience or access to corruption networks can explain this relationship. We leverage the gradual implementation of gender quotas in Spain to isolate the effects of women descriptive representation on public misconduct and adjudicate between alternative explanations. The analyses suggest a causal link between gender and malfeasance in office: the reform generated an exogenous increase in the share of women elected, which led to a decrease in corruption that was sustained over time. This finding enhances our understanding of the effects of descriptive representation, and of the role of parity laws in promoting political change.

Greater female presence in public institutions is correlated with lower levels of corruption. We conduct two survey experiments in Ghana to investigate whether end-users perceive women bureaucrats as less likely to solicit bribes than men. Our results show that respondents do not expect women bureaucrats to be less corrupt than men. Further, this result holds across bureaucrats with different levels of experience in the public sector. We use results from our second experiment to argue that bribe-taking rates are similar across genders because of equal financial pressures men and women face to contribute to their extended families. Our results cast doubt on the idea that women bureaucrats are an effective antidote to petty corruption.

How do different ways of portraying decision-making in high courts affect how people react to judicial decisions? Research in the United States points to the importance of depicting the Supreme Court as a neutral arbiter of legal controversies. However, the relevance of the myth of legality has been challenged. Furthermore, we know little about how different forms of judicial decision-making affect public attitudes in civil law countries. We explore these questions in two pre-registered experiments where we isolate the effects of procedure and outcome favorability. We find that citizens in Norway and Portugal are not adversely affected by Court rulings that emphasize policy goals, and that legal frames are not the only source of fairness perceptions or even of decisional acceptance. Together, the two studies reveal that preserving the “myth of legality” may not be a necessary condition to elicit support for judicial decisions in civil law systems.

Prior research suggests that partisanship can influence how legislators learn from each other. However, same-party governments are also more likely to share similar issues, ideological preferences and constituency demands. Establishing a causal link between partisanship and policy learning is difficult. In collaboration with a non-profit organization, this study isolates the role of partisanship in a real policy learning context. As part of a campaign promoting a new policy among local representatives in the United States, the study randomized whether the initiative was endorsed by co-partisans, out-partisans or both parties. The results show that representatives are systematically more interested in the same policy when it is endorsed by co-partisans. Bipartisan initiatives also attract less interest than co-partisan policies, and no more interest than out-partisan policies, even in more competitive districts. Together, the results suggest that ideological considerations cannot fully explain partisan-based learning. The study contributes to scholarship on policy diffusion, legislative signaling and interest group access.

To be responsive, politicians have to rely on beliefs about public will. Previous research suggests that perceptions of public opinion are often distorted. However, it remains unclear (1) why reelection-seeking officials misperceive constituent preferences, and (2) how to mitigate these distorted beliefs. I argue that misperceptions result in part from unequal exposure to different subconstituencies, and a tendency of legislators to project their own preferences on voters. A six-wave panel of Swedish MPs combined with mass surveys provides support for these arguments. Elite beliefs disproportionately reflect the preferences of more privileged subconstituencies and the personal positions of legislators. Additionally, an experiment with Swiss representatives leveraging real political events reveals how misperceptions can be reduced by encouraging a more balanced exposure to voters. The study concludes that economic and political inequalities are rooted in elite beliefs about public preferences and reveals ways to bolster the links between voters and their representatives.

How do parties respond to public opinion shifts on the campaign trail? While a vast literature looks at ideological updating across elections, the dynamics of short-term responsiveness remain largely a black box. I argue that campaign rhetoric reflects parties’ need to balance office and policy goals. Shifts in voter preferences alter the salience of these goals, leading parties to adjust their strategies. A novel dataset combining opinion polls with campaign statements by 68 European parties provides support for this argument. Parties performing well in the campaign pursue their dominant aims. However, when voters shift away from a party, leaders are impelled to accommodate their secondary goals: mainstream parties polarize to secure the support of core voters, while niche parties moderate their rhetoric to guarantee survival in parliament. The fluidity of party positioning uncovered here helps enlightening multiple questions left open by previous studies of policy responsiveness.

We explore the long-term political consequences of the Third Reich and show that current political intolerance, xenophobia, and voting for radical right-wing parties are associated with proximity to former Nazi concentration camps in Germany. This relationship is not explained by contemporary attitudes, the location of the camps, geographic sorting, the economic impact of the camps, or their current use. We argue that cognitive dissonance led those more directly exposed to Nazi institutions to conform with the belief system of the regime. These attitudes were then transmitted across generations. The evidence provided here contributes both to our understanding of the legacies of historical institutions, and the sources of political intolerance.

This article investigates how parties respond to polling results on the campaign trail. I argue that parties use pre-election polls as mobilization and fine-tuning devices. Opinion surveys that exceed expectations can be exploited to mobilize the party base. Disappointing polls, in turn, are publicly downplayed and criticized. However, this information can be used to refine campaign strategies. Parties underperforming in the polls have incentives to emphasize their own policy positions and to attack other parties. These arguments are supported by evidence from 2,140 campaign statements by Portuguese party leaders over two elections, combined with polling results. The findings suggest that parties carefully adjust their campaign rhetoric in response to public opinion signals. The study contributes to research on elite behavior and political representation. Moreover, it shows how research on campaign effects can benefit from a closer attention to the supply-side of campaigns.

We explore the role of partisanship in policy diffusion. Previous studies suggest that partisanship may influence the willingness of public officials to learn from the experience of their peers. Officials’ willingness to consider policies endorsed by copartisans can arise either because party labels are used as informational cues, or simply due to copartisan imitation. In the latter case, knowing more about the policy tradeoffs should have no effects on politicians’ preferences. Based on two experiments with local public officials where both the party endorsing a policy and the type of information provided were manipulated, we find consistent partisan bias. When a policy is endorsed by copartisans, public officials are more likely to consider pursuing it, and additional information does not mitigate this bias. Exploratory analyses of the information-seeking behavior of officials suggest that the partisan bias is not due to differential exposure or attention to policy tradeoffs.

This paper explores how political scandals are discounted over time. Previous research has shown that voters respond disproportionately to recent economic conditions when evaluating incumbents. We argue that voters discount not only the performance of incumbents in office, but also information about their personal character, largely due to accessibility biases. Building on a comprehensive database of congressional scandals covering the last four decades, we show that the electoral consequences of political scandals fade fairly quickly. Only cases emerging in the election-year systematically affect the vote share of incumbents. Moral scandals are the exception, with negative effects persisting over the entire term. In line with the mechanism proposed, additional analyses suggest this pattern results from disproportional levels of media attention, making moral scandals more easily retrieved from memory. The results broaden our understanding of the nature of myopic voting, and provide an explanation for the increasing reliance on negative campaigning.

Incentivized experiments allow researchers to better understand individuals’ behavior. Researchers typically use direct payments to participants as the incentive in these experiments. In some cases, however, direct payments cannot be used. Politicians, for example, are often not allowed to receive monetary inducements for participation. In two studies with state and city officials we test whether donations to charity are an effective alternative to direct payments. The experiments show that incentives do increase cognitive effort. When answering factual questions, politicians perform better when incentivized with either direct payments or donations to charity. Most importantly, both incentives improve performance. We also test whether these incentives affect officials’ level of risk aversion and find that the incentives have no effect. Our results suggest that donations to charity can be an effective alternative to direct payments in experiments with political elites.

One of the more important innovations in the study of how citizens assess the U.S. Supreme Court is the ideological updating model, which assumes that citizens grant legitimacy to the institution according to the perceived distance between themselves and the Court on a unidimensional ideological (liberal-conservative) continuum. Under this model, citizens are also said to update this calculation with every new salient Supreme Court decision. The model’s requirements, however, do not seem to square with the long-established view that Americans are largely innocent of ideology. Here, we conduct an audit of the model’s mechanisms using a series of empirical tests applied to a nationally representative sample. Our general conclusion is that the ideological updating model, especially when supplemented with the requirement that citizens must become aware of Court decisions, simply does not square with the realities of American politics. Students of Supreme Court legitimacy may therefore want to search for other theories of legitimacy updating.

Do voters behave strategically in local elections? Have voters become more strategic with democratic experience? Is there a relation between education and voters’ capacity to anticipate the mechanical effects of electoral statutes and adapt their behavior accordingly? Using an original dataset covering the complete democratic period, this paper studies split-ticket voting at the local level in Portugal. Using an ecological inference approach, we contribute to a vast body of literature on strategic voting by testing whether theories developed for national contexts travel to local contexts. Our findings suggest that (1) voters defect non-viable lists to support viable lists; (2) democratic experience helped voters to learn how to maximize their utility; and (3) that education is important for voters’ ability to identify a strategic setting.

The study of elite behavior grew remarkably in the last decades. We discuss the main tools that allowed this growth—survey, experiments, audit studies, text-as-data methods—and describe how they advanced our understanding of elite decision-making. However, recent scholarship has often disregarded the role of institutions. We posit that the next innovations in this field will bring institutions back into the study of elite behavior. We illustrate our argument through the literature on information and decision-making.

How do politicians evaluate and respond to evidence? Organizations across the world invest significant resources to produce policy evidence. Yet, politicians’ ability to use this evidence to inform policy decisions remains underexplored. In three experiments involving 3,521 mayors and councilors from six Western democracies, we find that representatives treat convenience samples, imprecise estimates, and correlational evidence as less informative. However, baseline levels of statistical literacy are low, and effect sizes are small. Compared to a sample of public policy experts, local politicians’ ability to discount unreliable evidence is 4-5 times lower. Moreover, statistical literacy does not necessarily translate into persuasion. When presented with large effect sizes, officials disregard the soundness of the evidence. More professionalized politicians are not better able to evaluate evidence. The results show that the prospects of informing policy with evidence will remain constrained without well-equipped decision-makers.

Contemporary democracies face growing public mistrust and disaffection. Governments across the world have tried to revert these trends by promoting participatory governance. Prior work has established how deliberation can empower citizens. However, whether these effects hold in real-life initiatives initiated by partisan governments remains unclear. We test the ability of citizens’ assemblies to foster democratic attitudes in a natural experiment leveraging the random selection of participants to Lisbon’s citizens’ assembly. Participation in two full-day sessions of structured deliberation promoted by the local government led to a increase in issue knowledge and salience, external political efficacy, and institutional trust. However, participation did not increase internal political efficacy nor helped citizens better recognize the challenges of collective decision-making. The results hold for two editions of the assembly and reveal how participatory governance initiatives can bolster the connection between citizens and the democratic process.

vidence-based policymaking requires policymakers to evaluate and incorporate evidence into their decision-making. However, policymakers may lack the expertise and incentives to do so. In a randomized controlled trial, we test the effects of a training program to teach elected officials how to collect and evaluate evidence. The training program, developed in part by the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Commission, was offered to local elected officials in Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Once registered, participants were randomly assigned either to the evidence-based policymaking training or a placebo training course. We find that the half day training course significantly improved statistical literacy, demand for evidence, and interest in partnering with academics. The training made participants think that finding academic partners was a more significant obstacle than they had thought. An ostensibly unrelated invitation to join a platform that connects policymakers to researchers measured the persistence of training effects 7 months after the sessions. The study reveals both promise and limitations of evidence-based policymaking.

Gender differences in political ambition are a key driver of the underrepresentation of women in politics. This gap persists among elected officials. We argue that women politicians are more likely to lack the necessary support network to navigate public office. In a field experiment with a civil society organization, we test whether providing women councillors in the UK with access to a real network of women councillors reduces the gender gap in political ambition. We find that women councillors exposed to the peer network are 10 percentage points more likely to express interest in running for re-election. Semi-structured interviews suggest that this effect is driven in part by shaping perceptions of isolation in office. The effects do not spillover to interest in running for higher office. Efforts to promote women representation would benefit from focusing not only on selection but also on retention of women in politics.

Empirical work on policy diffusion has established that policymakers are more likely to learn from the experiences of neighbors. Yet, the underlying mechanism behind spatially clustered policy learning remains unclear. Proximity may signal contextual similarity, leading officials to expect a better policy fit from nearby constituencies. However, proximity may impact policy learning simply due to information exposure. We adjudicate between these mechanisms by repurposing data from two field experiments that delivered information on new policy innovations to local politicians in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States while varying the constituency of the early adopters. Across studies, issues, and countries, we find no reliable evidence that geographic proximity to early adopters predicts interest in policy learning. The results reveal that proximity effects in studies of policy diffusion likely arise from differential exposure rather than contextual fit and contribute more broadly to our understanding of bounded rationality and elite behavior.