Lior Sheffer

Elected politicians make frequent judgments about their constituents: who they are, what they care about, and where they stand on the issues of the day. While politicians rely on these perceptions about their constituents when enacting policy, advocating for their constituents, and communicating with the public, research has documented large and pervasive errors in politicians' perceptions (1; 2; 3). Attempts to explain these errors with reference to politicians' experience, personal skill, or institutional positions have invariably failed (4). Here, combining data from many past studies with new surveys of elected politicians, we show that a domain-general tendency to hedge perceptions toward a moderate midpoint accounts for much of politicians' error. This "midpoint hedging" tendency holds across seven countries, all levels of government, and all perceptual tasks: constituents' policy preferences, policy priorities, and demographic characteristics. Our results suggest that domain-general patterns of human perception – such as social projection (5; 6), stereotyping (7), and midpoint hedging (8; 9) – offer a more powerful starting point for explanations of politicians' behaviour than do explanations rooted in politicians' individual characteristics. However, these domain-general tendencies are especially important and consequential in the domain-specific setting of politicians' work as representatives and legislators; politicians must understand their constituents to represent them well, and a perception-distorting cognitive tendency may undermine politicians' performance as representatives. We anticipate that our findings will serve as a basis for wider theories of elite political behaviour grounded in domain-general mechanisms.

We examine who mobilizes against democratic backsliding, focusing on mass protests against the judicial overhaul advanced by the Israeli government in 2023. As contemporary subversion of democracy is often driven by governments that won an electoral majority, we posit that protesting against the government's actions requires people to have a thick conception of democracy that goes beyond majority rule. Drawing on panel data collected before and after the overhaul's announcement, we show that citizens vary substantially in their conception of democracy, and that a thick conception not only predicts protesting against backsliding but also moderates the role of other key factors in mobilizing against democratic erosion. The findings highlight the role of small-d democrats in safeguarding democracy.

Considerable research has documented large errors in politicians' perceptions of their constituents' characteristics and preferences. Despite many attempts, explanations of these pervasive errors using domain-specific factors, such as politicians' role perceptions, time in office, or institutional positions, have invariably failed. Here, we suggest that politicians' perceptual errors reflect a domain-general tendency to "hedge" perceptions toward a moderate prior, resulting in overestimation of small proportions and underestimation of large proportions. To measure this domain-general phenomenon, we combine all available recent studies of elite perceptual accuracy with novel surveys of sitting elected politicians in Canada, for a total of more than 70,000 perceptions from 12,860 politicians in seven countries. We find strong evidence that "midpoint hedging" explains a substantial fraction of the variation in politicians' perceptual errors. This tendency persists across studies, estimation tasks, countries, and issue domains. Our findings suggest that politicians are more likely to misperceive public opinion when it is most lopsided, meaning that policy responsiveness would tend to be undersupplied precisely when citizens demand it most.

We explore how honesty-humility and the other HEXACO personality traits relate to citizens’ nascent ambition and their recruitment to run for office. We extend previous work on virtue-related personality traits and political recruitment in two important ways: we go beyond North America and conduct a five-country cross-national study with nationally representative samples. More importantly, going beyond individual-level differences in nascent ambition, we also address how honesty-humility predicts the likelihood of being asked to and actually running for office. Based on data from Canada, Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, we demonstrate that citizens with lower levels of honesty-humility are more likely to have considered running, to deem themselves qualified to run, to have been asked to run, and to actually have run for a political office. From a ‘virtue ethics’ perspective, this is highly concerning: low honesty-humility predisposes individuals to engage in unethical behavior and decision-making. We discuss implications for the quality of political representation.

How do politicians evaluate and respond to evidence? Organizations across the world invest significant resources to produce policy evidence. Yet, politicians’ ability to use this evidence to inform policy decisions remains underexplored. In three experiments involving 3,521 mayors and councilors from six Western democracies, we find that representatives treat convenience samples, imprecise estimates, and correlational evidence as less informative. However, baseline levels of statistical literacy are low, and effect sizes are small. Compared to a sample of social science undergraduates, local politicians’ ability to discount unreliable evidence is 4-5 times lower. Moreover, statistical literacy does not necessarily translate into persuasion. When presented with large effect sizes, officials disregard the quality of evidence. More professionalized politicians are not better able to evaluate evidence. The results reveal that the prospects of informing policy with evidence will remain constrained without well-equipped decision-makers.

Despite scientific consensus, beliefs in human-driven climate change are often influenced by political orientation. Although this political polarization of beliefs may stall mitigation policies, few studies have investigated politicians’ beliefs in human-driven climate change compared to citizens. This study explores how political orientation affects belief in climate change and policy support among politicians (N = 714) and citizens (N = 18,281) in eight developed democracies (Australia, Belgium (Flanders and Wallonia separately), Czechia, Germany, Israel, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway). In all countries, we find weaker belief in human-driven climate change among right-leaning politicians and citizens. This polarization was even stronger among politicians, with right-leaning politicians showing weaker climate change beliefs than their electorate. Furthermore, these politically polarized beliefs play a crucial role in policymaking, since belief in climate change mediates the impact of political orientation on mitigation policy support among politicians. Our findings highlight the need to debias beliefs and realign politicians’ and voters’ views about climate change, especially on the right-wing, to promote mitigation action.

The relationship between personality traits and political attitudes has been studied extensively. However, existing accounts largely study personality’s links to liberal-conservative divisions on social and economic issues. We know far less about its attitudinal influences when politics is organized around other issue domains, particularly ethnonational conflicts. Addressing this gap, we examine the relationship between the Big Five personality traits, policy preferences, and political orientation in Israel, where the main ideological cleavage involves the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Using original survey data, we find that the known relationships with social and economic attitudes operate only partly and more weakly in this context. Unlike these domains, conflict-related preferences in Israel correlate primarily with greater conscientiousness, largely through authoritarian tendencies. General Left-Right orientations mimic this relationship, reflecting conflict-related views rather than social or economic inclinations. These findings expand the scope of current debates about personality and political attitudes and underscore the importance of national ideological contexts for future research.

How elected representatives think about public opinion affects the degree to which policies are congruent with the public’s policy preferences. This is especially true for politicians occupying leadership positions, their perceptions matter even more. Extant work concluded that politicians in general do not exhibit a high perceptual accuracy, but direct evidence of the relative accuracy of leaders’ perceptions of public opinion is missing. Drawing on surveys among politicians and citizens in four countries, this study examines the accuracy of the public opinion perceptions of leaders and backbenchers. Irrespective of how leadership is defined and operationalized – executive or party leadership, formal or informal leadership, current or past leadership – we find low perceptual accuracy levels among leading politicians. Compared to backbenchers, and although politicians themselves consider leaders to have a special nose for public opinion, leading politicians do not possess a special public opinion rating skill.

While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians’ positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians’ theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one thousand politicians in 11 countries, together with corresponding surveys of more than twelve thousand citizens, we show that politicians overwhelmingly hold thin, minimalist, “democratic realist” theories of voting, while citizens’ theories are more optimistic and policy oriented. Politicians’ theoretical tendencies—along with their theoretical misalignment from citizens—are remarkably consistent across countries. These theories are likely to have important consequences for how politicians campaign, communicate with the public, think about public policy, and represent their constituents.