Elites and Experiments

Abstract

Within the framework of the section on 'Elites and Political Leadership', this panel on 'Elites and Experiments' brings together scholars who use experiments to study the attitudes and behavior of political elites. Besides their methodology (field & survey experiments), the papers included in the panel share a theoretical focus on how elected politicians process information coming from society and how they represent the public. In an era where the relationship between politicians and voters is under pressure—and where voters are increasingly dissatisfied with how they are represented by parties and politicians—questions about how political elites deal with information coming from these voters become very relevant. Experiments have proven to be valuable tools in this respect: they allow to test causal effects of voter information on politicians, and to unravel the mechanisms underlying politicians' informational and representational choices. In the discussions, there will be attention for both the methodological choices (including ethical considerations) and the theoretical contributions of the various experiment-based papers.