Paper is available via open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Our findings shed light on the personality selection funnel into higher-office politics, and help explain resulting leader behaviour patterns. Proud to be part of the team working on this paper, led by Thomas Bergeron, and including Eran Amsalem, Jeroen Joly, and Peter Loewen.

High levels of openness to experience, which characterize most politicians exhibit, are only weakly appealing, especially among right-leaning voters. In a conjoint experiment, we find that these effects on leader preference outweigh factors such as age, education, gender, and experience. /3

We find remarkable consistency across countries and ideologies when citizens choose their party leaders: they are extremely averse to displays of neuroticism, and strongly reward candidates who are conscientious, agreeable, and to a lesser degree extrovert /2

Thanks Lucy! We love the Fastenrath and Marx paper, and figuring out which politicians even benchmark themselves against opinion polling is a priority for us, along with better understanding the inherent tension politicians face between responding to public opinion and working to change it.

Our findings undermine the idea that leaders possess some unique capacity to 'get' the public. And because they have the most power to shape agendas and policies, their perceptual errors are especially concerning for the kind of representation citizens get in democratic systems. More in the paper!

This result holds when we ask politicians to think about the general public and their own party voters; under different definitions of seniority; and even when we specifically look at those politicians who are (incorrectly) singled out by colleagues for being good at understanding public opinion. /3

We find that while politicians themselves strongly believe that top politicians - such as party leaders and cabinet ministers - excel at understanding what people want, in reality these senior figures - who were included in our sample of >800 politicians - are just as inaccurate as the rest! /2

@annerasmussen.bsky.social, and Maj-Britt Sterba!

Stefaan Walgrave, Karolin Soontjens, Eran Amsalem, Pirmin Bundi, Frédéric Varone, @stefaniebailer.bsky.social, @nathaliebrack.bsky.social, @breunig.bsky.social, Linda Coufalová, Patrick Dumont, @nathaliegiger.bsky.social, @miguelpereira.bsky.social, Mikael Persson, @jbpilet.bsky.social /6

@jacklucas.bsky.social, Peter Loewen and I are indebted to our wonderful team of co-authors: /5

In the paper, we argue that politicians' theories of voters are very likely consequential for how they campaign, communicate, think about public policy, and represent constituents. We also outline a new research agenda stemming from our findings. Lots more in the paper! /4

Only 16% of politicians are "democratic optimists", who see voters as knowledgeable, fair assessors of blame and credit, who care about the long term and society as a whole when voting. Citizens, on the other hand, are equally split between optimism and realism in their views. /3

Nearly 75% of all politicians adhere to what we call "democratic realism" - they think that voters are ignorant, short-term focused, egocentric, and vote based on deeply held identities rather than policy positions. This happens in every country we study. /2