In “A League of Their Own?”: Judgment and Decision Making By Politicians and Non-politicians

Barbara Vis, Sjoerd Stolwijk

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Are there systematic differences between the behaviour of politicians – such as ministers, members of parliament or elected municipal council members – and that of ‘the rest of us’? Are politicians in a ‘league of their own’ in terms of how they take decisions and make judgements? In the existing literature, there is no overriding consensus or clear majority of findings on these questions. We add to this literature by leveraging results from an experiment with two samples: (1) Dutch locally elected politicians (n = 211) and (2) students (n = 260). The experiment examined whether these two groups displayed biases related to the representativeness heuristic and the availability heuristic – two so-called general purpose heuristics – and whether they displayed the reflection effect. Our findings demonstrate that politicians’ judgements and decisions are largely similar to those of the rest of us, indicating that there is little evidence of an elite-public gap in this respect. Under specific circumstances, however, politicians do differ in their judgement and decision making. These differences may have consequences for the functioning of representative democracy and for policy making. It is especially noteworthy that in this study political experience or expertise did not reduce decision-making biases.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPsychology of Democracy
Subtitle of host publicationOf the People, By the People, For the People
EditorsAshley Weinberg
Place of PublicationCambridge and New York
PublisherCambridge University Press
Chapter6
Pages124-145
ISBN (Electronic)9781108774871
ISBN (Print)9781108477758
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2022

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