Prostate cancer and expertise in politics

Policy-making is ideally evidence-based, relying on rigorous data and empirical research to inform decisions that affect the public. Therefore, a general expectation is that, when presented to new piece of factual information, politicians should be open to updating their personal opinions on the issue, as well as to consider taking new political action. Such an expectation is, however, rather naïve. We know that politicians are presented with a lot of new pieces of information. They will therefore discard some of them and be more or less responsive to voters. Furthermore, (perceived) expertise also plays a role. The ‘expertise paradox’ shows that more knowledgeable politicians are often less responsive to voters’ opinions and more likely to dismiss contrasting views, especially in areas where they have significant expertise (Pereira and Öhberg 2024). This increased knowledge can lead to dogmatism and reduced openness to alternative perspectives. But most studies concentrate on dismissing voters’ preferences rather than scientific or factual evidence and focus on the factors impacting elites’ responsiveness to voters. Here the focus would be on factual signals, rather than voters’ signal and the factors impacting MPs ‘reaction to new factual information. In the new experiment that we propose for POLPOP III, we want to test the effect of two factors that could limit the effect of new factual information on politicians’ willingness to update their attitudes on the issue and to take new policy initiatives: 1) the perceived credibility of the source of factual information and 2) the expertise of MPs. In addition to that, we would also like to continue the previous line of enquiry of Polpop on whether politicians suffer from the same decision-making bias as citizens (Sheffer et al. 2018) and examine whether politicians are more rational and open-minded than citizens when facing new factual information. From political theory (Manin 1995; Parry 2005), we could expect elites to be more ‘enlightened’ than citizens, and therefore more open to take into account new facts. A strand of literature relies indeed on that assumption that elected politicians are cool-headed, purposive utility maximizers with full knowledge and make therefore higher-quality decisions (Axelrod 2015; Dewan and Spirling 2011; Dunleavy 2014). But empirical studies seem to show that politicians display the same psychological bias and shortcuts when it comes to making decisions (Sheffer et al. 2018).