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To be responsive, politicians have to rely on beliefs about public will. Previous research suggests that perceptions of public opinion are often distorted. However, it remains unclear (1) why reelection-seeking officials misperceive public preferences and (2) how to mitigate these distorted beliefs. I argue that misperceptions result from unequal exposure to different subconstituencies and a tendency of legislators to project their own preferences on voters. I find support for these arguments in a six-wave panel of Swedish MPs combined with mass surveys. Elite beliefs disproportionately reflect the preferences of privileged voters and the personal positions of legislators. Additionally, an experiment with Swiss representatives leveraging real political events reveals how misperceptions can be reduced by encouraging a more balanced exposure to voters. The study concludes that economic and political inequalities are rooted in elite beliefs about the electorate and reveals ways to bolster the links between voters and their representatives.

AbstractPrior research suggests that partisanship can influence how legislators learn from each other. However, same-party governments are also more likely to share similar issues, ideological preferences and constituency demands. Establishing a causal link between partisanship and policy learning is difficult. In collaboration with a non-profit organization, this study isolates the role of partisanship in a real policy learning context. As part of a campaign promoting a new policy among local representatives in the United States, the study randomized whether the initiative was endorsed by co-partisans, out-partisans or both parties. The results show that representatives are systematically more interested in the same policy when it is endorsed by co-partisans. Bipartisan initiatives also attract less interest than co-partisan policies, and no more interest than out-partisan policies, even in more competitive districts. Together, the results suggest that ideological considerations cannot fully explain partisan-based learning. The study contributes to scholarship on policy diffusion, legislative signaling and interest group access.

AbstractWe argue that policy expertise constrains the ability of politicians to act on voter preferences. Representatives with more knowledge and experience in a given domain have more confidence in their own issue-specific positions. Enhanced confidence, in turn, may lead politicians to discount opinions they disagree with, producing a distorted image of the electorate. Two experiments with Swedish politicians support this argument. First, officials are more likely to dismiss appeals from voters in their areas of expertise and less likely to accept that opposing views may represent the majority opinion. Consistent with the proposed mechanism, in a second experiment we show that inducing perceptions of expertise increases self-confidence. The results suggest that representatives with more specialized knowledge in a given area may be less capable of acting as delegates in that domain. The study provides a novel explanation for variations in policy responsiveness.

More women in public institutions are correlated with lower levels of corruption. However, this relationship is thought to be context specific, and the mechanisms that underlie it remain unclear. We conduct two survey experiments to investigate whether and why end-users expect women bureaucrats to be less corrupt in Ghana. Our results show that citizens do not expect women bureaucrats to be less likely to solicit bribes than men. This result holds across bureaucrats with different levels of experience in the public sector and respondents who have and have not paid a bribe. Our second experiment shows that citizens expect men and women bureaucrats to distribute equal shares of their salaries with their extended families. We argue that equality in financial pressures explains why bribe-taking rates may be similar across genders. Our results cast doubt on the idea that women bureaucrats will reduce petty corruption in countries where corruption is pervasive.

Previous studies uncovered a negative relationship between the proportion of women in public office and corruption. These findings have inspired anti‐corruption programs around the world. It remains unclear, however, whether there is a causal link between the share of women in office and malfeasance. For instance, gender differences in political experience or access to corruption networks might explain this relationship. We leverage the gradual implementation of gender quotas in Spain to isolate the effects of female descriptive representation on public misconduct and adjudicate between alternative explanations. The analyses suggest a causal link between gender and malfeasance in office: the reform generated an exogenous increase in the share of women elected, which led to a decrease in corruption that was sustained over time. This finding enhances our understanding of the effect of public officials' characteristics on policy outcomes, and of the role of parity laws in promoting political change.

This paper explores how political scandals are discounted over time. Previous research has shown that voters respond disproportionately to recent economic conditions when evaluating incumbents. We argue that voters discount not only the performance of incumbents in office but also information about their personal character, largely due to accessibility biases. Building on a comprehensive database of congressional scandals covering the last four decades, we show that the electoral consequences of political scandals fade fairly quickly. Only cases emerging in the election-year systematically affect the vote share of incumbents. Moral scandals are the exception, with negative effects persisting over the entire term. In line with the mechanism proposed, additional analyses suggest this pattern results from disproportional levels of media attention, making moral scandals more easily retrieved from memory. The results broaden our understanding of the nature of myopic voting and provide an explanation for the increasing reliance on negative campaigning.

We explore the role of partisanship in policy diffusion. Previous studies suggest that partisanship may influence the willingness of public officials to learn from the experience of their peers. Officials' willingness to consider policies endorsed by copartisans can arise either because party labels are used as informational cues or simply due to copartisan imitation. In the latter case, knowing more about the policy trade-offs should have no effects on politicians' preferences. Based on two experiments with local public officials where both the party endorsing a policy and the type of information provided were manipulated, we find consistent partisan bias. When a policy is endorsed by copartisans, public officials are more likely to consider pursuing it, and additional policy information does not mitigate this bias. Exploratory analyses of the information-seeking behavior of officials suggest that the partisan bias is not due to differential exposure or attention to policy trade-offs.

Incentivized experiments are frequently used to learn about individuals' social, political, and economic behavior. However, public officials and other individuals are sometimes barred from accepting payment for anything related to their position, so money cannot be used in experiments (e.g., Butler and Kousser 2015). We assess whether donations to charity can be used to incentivize public officials, as an alternative to traditional monetary inducements.

Pepinsky, Goodman, and Ziller (2024, American Political Science Review, PGZ) reassess a recent study on the long-term consequences of concentration camps in Germany. The authors conclude that accounting for contemporary (i.e., post-treatment) state heterogeneity in the models provides unbiased estimates of the effects of camps on current-day outgroup intolerance. In this note, we show that PGZ's empirical strategy rests on (a) a mischaracterization of what regional fixed effects capture and (b) two unrealistic assumptions that can be avoided with pre-treatment state fixed effects. We further demonstrate that results from the original article remain substantively the same when we incorporate regional fixed effects correctly. Finally, simulations reveal that camp proximity consistently outperforms spatially correlated noise in this specific study. The note contributes to the growing literature on legacy studies by advancing the discussion about the correct modeling choices in this challenging field.

We explore the long-term political consequences of the Third Reich and show that current political intolerance, xenophobia, and voting for radical right-wing parties are associated with proximity to former Nazi concentration camps in Germany. This relationship is not explained by contemporary attitudes, the location of the camps, geographic sorting, the economic impact of the camps, or their current use. We argue that cognitive dissonance led those more directly exposed to Nazi institutions to conform with the belief system of the regime. These attitudes were then transmitted across generations. The evidence provided here contributes both to our understanding of the legacies of historical institutions and the sources of political intolerance.

One of the more important innovations in the study of how citizens assess the U.S. Supreme Court is the ideological updating model, which assumes that citizens grant legitimacy to the institution according to the perceived distance between themselves and the Court on a unidimensional ideological (liberal–conservative) continuum. Under this model, citizens are also said to update this calculation with every new salient Supreme Court decision. The model's requirements, however, do not seem to square with the long-established view that Americans are largely innocent of ideology. Here, we conduct an audit of the model's mechanisms using a series of empirical tests applied to a nationally representative sample. Our general conclusion is that the ideological updating model, especially when supplemented with the requirement that citizens must become aware of Court decisions, simply does not square with the realities of American politics. Students of Supreme Court legitimacy may therefore want to search for other theories of legitimacy updating.