The Politics of Information. How Political Elites Select and Process Information

Responding to real-world problems is a core task for all governments in well-functioning democracies. At any given time, political elites have to address a multitude of problems, ranging from economic downturns and mass unemployment to underperforming hospitals and schools. To perform this task, political elites need to be exposed to and process information about problems, their potential solutions, and the associated preferences of citizens. One could even argue that information is the most important resource in politics. Information is a pre-condition for good representation, it is a necessary condition for adequate policy-making, and it is the main currency in the political game. The goal of this workshop is to stimulate frontier research on this important matter and to bring together scholars from different sub-disciplines who share a research interest in the politics of information. Political science and psychology have amply dealt with how ordinary citizens perceive and interpret the world around them and how they selectively process information. Much less is known, however, about how individual political elites and leaders read society and process information. Studying these questions opens up new challenges to political science researchers, both theoretically and empirically, and the purpose of this workshop is to advance our understanding of how political elites process information and how this affects the decisions they make.