Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Testing Group-Level Differences in Political Decision-Making

公民把做出重要决定的权力委托给民选官员。民选官员既要代表选民，又要领导选民，部分原因是直接民主对一个大国来说是不切实际的。间接代表的后果是什么？如果普通公民制定政策，他们的决策过程和选择与民选官员的决策过程和选择有什么不同吗？通过创新的实验设计，该项目测试了民选官员和普通公民在决策方面的差异程度。民选官员和普通公民的决策背景或情况不同，但一般而言，他们的决策能力不应有所不同。因此，问题在于民选官员和普通公民在决策时是否受到相同背景的同等影响。本项目重点关注民选官员所熟悉的两种情况：对自己的决定负责，以及高风险和后果严重的情况。该项目测试了这样一个命题：在责任和高风险的环境中，焦虑程度较低的人最能从新信息中学习。为此目的，该项目审查焦虑对民选官员和普通公民决策质量的影响。主要的假设是，民选官员的决策经验会导致较低的平均焦虑水平。因此，与普通公民在相同背景下的信息搜索和学习模式相比，民选官员的信息搜索和从信息中学习的模式应该较少受到问责制和高风险背景的影响。为了验证这些假设，该项目使用了一个电脑化的信息板，上面描述了一系列假设的公共政策问题，并列出了可能解决这些问题的方案。共有400名参与者从两组中平均抽取，一组是明尼苏达州普通成年人口中的普通公民，另一组是明尼苏达州州和地方一级的民选官员，他们被要求在决策场景中扮演民选官员的角色。这项研究是政治学中第一个比较直选官员和普通公民政治决策的研究。一场重要的辩论围绕着这样一个观点展开：民选官员是利用洞察力和信息代表我们做出决定的“受托人”，还是仅仅充当选民代理人的“代表”。无论哪种方式，公民都暗中相信民选官员做出的决定至少与他们自己可能做出的决定一样好，甚至更好。由于我们对个人政治决策的异同所知甚少，我们只能推测，与我们目前的间接民主制度相比，一种更直接的民主形式会是什么样子。该项目有助于实现这一重要目标，即确定公民将其偏好反映在公共政策中的最佳方式。

Citizens entrust elected officials with the power to make important decisions. Elected officials are supposed to lead as well as to represent their constituents in part because direct democracy is impractical for a large country. What are the consequences of indirect representation? If ordinary citizens made policies, would their decision making processes and choices differ from elected officials' processes and choices? Through an innovative experimental design, this project tests the extent to which elected officials and everyday citizens differ in their decision-making. The contexts or situations of decision-making for elected officials and everyday citizens are distinct, but in general, their decision-making abilities should not differ. Thus, the question is whether elected officials and everyday citizens are equally affected in their decision-making by the same contexts. This project focuses on two contexts familiar to elected officials: accountability for one's decisions and situations with high stakes and consequences. The project tests the proposition that individuals who experience lower levels of anxiety in contexts of accountability and high stakes are best able to learn from new information. To this end, the project examines the effects of anxiety on the quality of decision-making among both elected officials and ordinary citizens. The main hypothesis is that elected officials' experience with decision-making to lead to lower average levels of experienced anxiety. Thus, elected officials' patterns of information-seeking and learning from information should be less affected by contexts of accountability and high stakes, as compared to everyday citizens' patterns of information search and learning in the same contexts. To test these hypotheses, the project uses a computerized information board, which describes a series of hypothetical public policy problems and lists potential options that could solve them. A total of 400 participants are sampled equally from two groups, everyday citizens sampled from the general adult populations of Minnesota and elected officials serving in Minnesota at the state and local level and are asked to role-play the part of an elected official during the decision scenarios. This study is the first research in political science to compare directly elected officials' and everyday citizens' political decision-making. An important debate revolves around the idea of whether elected officials are "trustees" who use insight and information to make decisions on our behalf or "delegates" who merely act as stand-ins for constituents. Either way, citizens implicitly trust elected officials to make decisions that are at least as good, if not better than what they themselves might do. Because we know little about the similarities and differences in individuals' political decision-making, we can only speculate what a more direct form of democracy would look like compared to our present system of indirect democracy. This project contributes to this important goal of determining the best way for citizens to have their preferences reflected in public policy.