Do Politicians use Cognitive Heuristics like the Rest of Us?

Political elites receive vast amounts of information on a daily basis. Do they use this information to arrive at a comprehensively rational decision, as normative rational choice theory proposes? Or do political elites –like “the rest of us”– resort to cognitive heuristics or shortcuts in their judgment and decision making, as a bounded rationality approach predicts (Baumgartner & Jones, 2015; Simon, 1955; 1985)? Political elites’ information processing may be more “rational” than that of the rest of us. For one, political elites’ decisions are oftentimes consequential, including for themselves. Moreover, politics is subject to a process of rationalization (Meyer et al., 1997). Still, several observational studies showed that also political elites use two so-called general purpose heuristics –availability and representativeness– in their judgment and decision making (Jacobs, 2011; Weyland, 2009, 2014). To the best of my knowledge, whether political elites employ heuristics like the rest of us has not yet been tested directly and experimentally. I fill this lacuna by conducting a pilot experiment with as main participants Dutch local politicians from big cities. While these politicians may not qualify as “true” elites, I will argue that do make for a useful pilot sample. To validate the experimental set-up and to enable a direct comparison with the rest of us, I run the experiment also with a student-sample. To make the results comparable to the findings of the ample existing experiments on the employment of heuristics (Gilovich et al., 2002), my pilot includes seminal, well-known decision situations in addition to several novel decision situations that are closer to political elites’ judgment and decision-making. Hereby, this study’s findings contribute to our understanding of how political elites process information and how this influences their decisions.