EU4B1      Half Unit
Political Elites, Leadership, and Decision-Making

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

In public discourse, politicians and decision-makers are often described as resourceful, opportunistic actors driven by selfish interests. Reality is considerably more nuanced and less Machiavellian. Politicians often lack resources to make informed decisions, suffer from cognitive biases, and rely on misperceptions and stereotypes that are ultimately reflected on policy. Political elites are also responsible for a great deal of unrecognized work that cannot be explained simply by the desire to be re-elected. This course introduces students to the quantitative study of political elites and decision-making in European countries, drawing from historical and contemporary research in political science, psychology, and sociology. The course will pool insights from scholarship on elite behaviour in subnational, national, and supranational governments. Throughout the term we will learn: What drives individuals to run for office? How do politicians learn about policies? How do politicians coordinate with each other and make decisions? How do psychological biases influence the behaviour of politicians, and how can these biases be overcome? How do representatives build their image of the electorate? How do parties constrain legislators? By focusing on political elites, the course will help students understand the underlying challenges of the policymaking process as well as the pitfalls of representative democracy in Europe. More importantly, it will provide tools for students to address these challenges.

2 hours of seminars in the Spring Term.
15 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Presentation

Research design (1000 words)

Students will develop collaborative research projects on elite behaviour in three stages. First, students will work in groups to develop research questions related to topics in elite behaviour and political decision-making. Second, they will design a survey instrument to answer this question. Finally, students will have the opportunity to implement these survey instruments in the European Panel of Local Officials (EPLO) if approved by an external committee. EPLO is an international survey of local elected officials (mayors and council members) in seven European countries. This practical opportunity will allow students to test with real politicians some of the research questions covered in class. Students will be given detailed instructions about the project in week 2 so that they can start to work on this over the term.

• Dahl, Robert A. (1961/2005). Who Governs?. New Haven: Yale University Press,
• Prewitt, Kenneth, and Alan Stone. 2019. “The ruling elites.” in Power in Modern Societies
• Searing, Donald D. “Roles, rules, and rationality in the new institutionalism.” 1991. American Political Science Review.
• Lawless, J. L., & Fox, R. L. (2010). It still takes a candidate: Why women don’t run for office. Cambridge University Press.
• Gulzar, S. (2021). Who enters politics and why?. Annual Review of Political Science, 24, 253-275.
• Sheffer, L., Loewen, P. J., Soroka, S., Walgrave, S., & Sheafer, T. (2018). Nonrepresentative representatives: An experimental study of the decision making of elected politicians. American Political Science Review.
• Pereira, M. M. (2021). Understanding and reducing biases in elite beliefs about the electorate. American Political Science Review.
• Payne, James L. et al. (1984) The Motivation of Politicians. Chicago: Nelson Hall
• Zelizer, A. (2019). Is position-taking contagious? evidence of cue-taking from two field experiments in a state legislature. American Political Science Review.
• Broockman, D. E., & Butler, D. M. (2017). The causal effects of elite position‐taking on voter attitudes: Field experiments with elite communication. American Journal of Political Science.

Written test (100%)

The written test for this course will be administered via Moodle. Questions will be made available at a set date/time and students will be given a set period in the ST to complete the answers to questions and upload their responses back into Moodle.