Do Political Elites 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)? Research shows that elite decision making processes have both similarities and differences compared to non-elites (Hafner-Burton, Hughes, & Victor, 2013; Haigh & List, 2005; Linde & Vis, 2017). Their experience, and the selection processes preceding their appointment, may make political elites’ information processing more “rational” than that of the rest of us. Their decisions are oftentimes consequential, and 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). People employ the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) when they assess how likely it is that something occurs (e.g. a new party entering office) by focusing on the ease with which they can think of instances or occurrences of it (new parties that were successful in entering office). People use the representativeness heuristic (Böhmelt et al., 2016; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974: 1124) when they assess to which degree phenomenon A (like population ageing in Europe) resembles phenomenon B (population ageing in the Netherlands). These two heuristics play a key role in the “heuristics and biases”-school, and each of them involves particular biases (Gilovich et al., 2002). They are especially relevant to political decision making, since they can help explain which proposals are more likely to be proposed (more available), and which are perceived as more likely to solve the issue at hand (more representative of successful proposals), when facing uncertain choices (Kahneman & Tversky 1972; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). To the best of our knowledge, whether political elites employ these heuristics like the rest of us has not yet been tested directly and experimentally. We fill this lacuna by conducting an experiment with as main participants Dutch local politicians from big cities. Like their national counterparts, these mid-level elites are selected competitively and make decisions affecting large amounts of citizens. Using mid-level elites as participants allows for a larger sample. The population of political elites is relatively small, making it hard to have a sample of participants that is large enough to obtain valid and significant results. To make the results comparable to existing experimental findings (Gilovich et al., 2002), our pilot includes seminal, well-known decision situations in addition to several novel decision situations that are closer to political elites’ judgment and decision-making. We also include a student-sample for comparison. Hereby, this study’s findings contribute to our understanding of how political elites process information and how this influences their decisions.