Elite Ideology, Partisanship & Information: Two Experiments on Political Elites

• In Event: Experiments in Parties and Political Organizations Research

Abstract

Research on interest group politics has increasingly turned its attention toward individual political elites who engage in and monitor the policy process: lobbyists, journalists, think tank experts, legislative staff, civil servants, lawmakers, and so on. Political elites by definition have expertise, specialized knowledge, and professional experience that make them more politically sophisticated than even the most engaged citizens. This relatively high political sophistication and domain-specific expertise suggests that they have the ability to seek out, process, and use technical information to deliberate critical policy decisions. Yet, a growing literature challenges the assumption that elites make fully informed decisions following thorough deliberation. Instead they adopt partisan or ideologically motivated information processing strategies that bias their decisions.

This paper investigates political elites’ information evaluation practices through two separate pre-registered conjoint experiments embedded in large scale surveys of Washington, DC-based political elites. The 2019 Congressional Capacity Survey recruited more than 350 staffers on Capitol Hill and the 2020 Survey of Political Elites and Public Servants recruited roughly 2,800 lobbyists, association executives, lawyers, civil servants, judges and judicial clerks, congressional staffers, and military personnel. Each survey embedded a similar conjoint experiment design that prompted respondents to learn more about a salient issue. They were then presented with two hypothetical reports issued by well-known Washington research organizations, such as think tanks. The report briefly summarizes the issue using an ideologically oriented frame. The information source reflects center-left, neutral, or center-right ideological commitments. Respondents are then asked which report they are more likely to rely on to learn more about the issue.

These novel experiments allow us to causally estimate the effect of information source and content on political elites’ information use behavior. And, subsample analysis by party identification, ideology, employment setting, policy knowledge, and other attributes reveal that elites are subject to many of the same blinders that average citizens use when evaluating political information.

Authors

• Alexander Charles Furnas, University of Michigan

• Timothy M. LaPira, James Madison University