Behavioural Foundations of Elite Politics: How Individual-Level Characteristics Shape the Decision Making of Elected Politicians

What kind of decisions makers are elected politicians? Do they exhibit the same cognitive biases and choice anomalies that plague the reasoning of everyday citizens? Do they acquire some degree of expertise that makes their decision making systematically different? And what explains differences between different groups of politicians in how they confront policy problems and other in-office challenges? This dissertation consists of five papers that attempt to provide empirical answers for these questions from an individual-level behavioural perspective. These papers use evidence derived principally from in-person and online experiments conducted with hundreds of incumbent politicians and thousands of citizens in four countries. I find that politicians are equally susceptible as citizens to a series of policy-critical choice anomalies, including equivalency framing effects, the status-quo bias, escalation of commitment in face of sunk costs, and discounting future payoffs. In some cases they exhibit certain biases even more strongly than non-elites. I further document systematic differences between politicians in these domains, in ways that are directly tied to being held politically accountable and to the nature of their elected office: representatives who are more overconfident regarding their likelihood of being re-elected exhibit stronger risk-seeking behaviour; local officials who report an interest in future office-holding are strongly responsive to accountability cues, resulting in greater willingness to take risks, while those who are uninterested in re-election exhibit no behaviour change; and female and male politicians respond in opposite ways to being held publicly accountable, with men being significantly more likely to abandon policy choices presented as the status quo, and women becoming more entrenched in it. Finally, I use a formal model to analyze the implication of heterogeneity among elected officials in their capacity to engage in strategic reasoning in the context of elite frame production. Together, the papers in this dissertation provide an empirically-grounded and nuanced set of insights on elite decision making in politics that question the adequacy of numerous influential political science models and theories, which have either been relying on untested assumptions regarding elite behaviour, or have overlooked them altogether.Ph.D