Nonrepresentative Representatives: An Experimental Study of the Decision Making of Elected Politicians

Abstract

A considerable body of work in political science is built upon the assumption that politicians are more purposive, strategic decision makers than the citizens who elect them. At the same time, other work suggests that the personality profiles of office seekers and the environment they operate in systematically amplifies certain choice anomalies. These contrasting perspectives persist absent direct evidence on the reasoning characteristics of representatives. We address this gap by administering experimental decision tasks to incumbents in Belgium, Canada, and Israel. We demonstrate that politicians are as or more subject to common choice anomalies when compared to nonpoliticians: they exhibit a stronger tendency to escalate commitment when facing sunk costs, they adhere more to policy choices that are presented as the status-quo, their risk calculus is strongly subject to framing effects, and they exhibit distinct future time discounting preferences. This has obvious implications for our understanding of decision making by elected politicians.

Equal Access to the Top? Representative Bureaucracy and Politicians’ Recruitment Preferences for Top Administrative Staff

“…In this respect, representative bureaucracy scholars may find it helpful to consult the literature on hiring discrimination, since a number of sociodemographic characteristics have proven important to discrimination in this literature, including disability, religion, and union affiliation (Baert 2017). Finally, the findings add to the growing literature on partisan and ideological biases in political decision making (e.g., Baekgaard and Kjaergaard 2016;Baekgaard et al 2017;Blom-Hansen et al 2018;Demaj 2017;George et al 2018;Nielsen and Moynihan 2017;Porter and Rogowski Forthcoming;Sheffer et al 2017) by emphasizing how ideological biases also matter beyond purely political decisions for more organizational matters.…”

Loss Aversion in Politics

“…See, for instance, Quattrone and Tversky (), Berejikian (), Druckman and Lupia (), Mercer (), Soroka (), and Sheffer et al. ().…”

“…Many scholars believe that voters are used to comparing benefits and costs of reforms to the status quo (e.g., Pierson ; Sheffer et al. ; Van deWardt ; Vis and van Kersbergen ).…”

Prospect theory and foreign policy decision-making: Underexposed issues, advancements, and ways forward

“…Ideally, these experiments should be conducted with political elites as the main participants. This will be challenging, but not impossible, as testified by experiments with members of national parliaments from different countries (Linde & Vis, 2017a;Sheffer, Loewen, Soroka, Walgrave, & Shaefer, 2017) or with high level military decision makers (Haerem et al, 2011).…”