How Do Politicians and Citizens Bargain with Each Other? A Four-Country Study

• In Event: The Effect of Citizens and Local Politics on Legislatures

Abstract

In the study of democratic representation, interactions between politicians and citizens are frequently described and modelled as negotiation processes, most famously through the framework of ultimatum bargaining (Romer and Rosenthal, 1978; Lupia, 1992; Hibbing and Alford, 2004). Bargaining is also inherent to how politicians engage with each other, in almost every aspect of their work. The results of such negotiations shape politicians’ electoral fortunes, the policy outcomes that citizens experience, and a host of other politically-critical outcomes. Despite the theoretical centrality and consequential nature of these processes, direct, controlled evidence on how politicians and citizens bargain with each other is effectively nonexistent: it is either explored using formal models, studied indirectly based on observed outcomes of negotiation processes, or relies on convenience samples in laboratory experiments. We argue that a valid investigation of these processes requires evaluating how both sitting politicians and citizens perform in bargaining tasks under controlled conditions, in theoretically-meaningful scenarios. To do so, we recruit 866 politicians who are sitting members of parliament in four countries (Belgium, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland), and close to 12,000 citizens who comprise representative samples of the population in those countries, to participate in a modified ultimatum game experiment in which they are coupled with either a politician or a citizen bargaining partner. Our results are striking and remarkably consistent across our country cases. First, compared to citizens bargaining with other citizens, when politicians bargain with citizens they make extremely generous offers and pose very low demands. Second, both citizens and politicians significantly lower their offers and raise their demands when they are required to bargain with politicians, but the effect is more pronounced among politicians. Third, we uncover important partisanship effects, demonstrating that politicians are substantively and significantly more reactive to information about the target's party identity compared to citizens. Our findings directly inform existing models of citizen-elite dynamics. They also strongly comport with politicians acting as wary cooperators, a theory that was developed to describe the strategic logic of elite decision makers who require public support, but has never been tested with politicians. We discuss further implications on theories of legislative behavior and elite expertise.

Authors

• Lior Sheffer, Tel Aviv University

• Peter Loewen, University of Toronto