A presentation by Christian Breunig, Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics & Public Administration, and, Maj-Britt Sterba, Postdoctoral researcher at the Cluster „The Politics of Inequality“ from the University of Konstanz.
Do politicians know what the majority opinion within their party is? Can the majority opinion move a politician’s own position? For many social interactions, a difference between the publicly stated and perceived preferences and those that are privately held exists. On some issues, politicians privately hold a minority position within their party. Because of internal and external competition, these preferences might not be publicly stated and widely shared. In addition to divergent preferences, one reason might be that they simply underestimate the support for a given policy. We argue that these misperceptions can be corrected by providing legislators with information about the policy position of their colleagues within the party. Theories of persuasion and cue-taking suggest that this is an effective strategy when people in a similar position offer an alternative view. The pre-registered experimental design leverages the repeated data collection among elected politicians in eight countries. By showing that co-partisan legislators affect the policy preferences of their colleagues, the study speaks to a larger debate about unequal representation. An often-voiced mechanism holds that social learning and ascriptive homophily lead to “echo chambers” among descriptively similar legislators and their elitist social contacts. This study examines a crucial assumption of this argument: legislators persuade one another.
This event is part of the Political Economy Lunch Seminar series.
