Large Ordinary Minds in Extraordinary Positions. Biases, Emotions, and Learning in Political Decision-Making

Democracy depends on the judgments of a small group of elected officials whose choices ripple across institutions, policies, and societies. Yet the environments in which politicians operate are complex, fast-moving, and saturated with information, creating conditions in which even experienced officeholders may struggle to process signals or weigh consequences. The central motivation of this dissertation is to better understand how politicians actually make decisions under such constraints: what shapes their perceptions, what shortcuts they rely on, and how emotions and information flows influence their choices.

This dissertation examines the cognitive and emotional underpinnings of political decision-making among elites, contributing to the literature that challenges the assumption that elected officials are fundamentally more rational or informed than ordinary citizens. The framing chapter situates the project within the long intellectual tradition of “elite exceptionalism” in political science, reviews behavioral theories of bounded rationality and heuristics, and reflects on the methodological challenges of studying officeholders directly. Against this backdrop, the dissertation sets out to test whether politicians truly differ from citizens in their use of shortcuts, their reactions to electoral outcomes, and their susceptibility to external influence.

The four empirical chapters address these questions across diverse contexts and mechanisms. The first paper introduces the concept of elected losers, showing that legislators in Latin America who win their seats but see their party lose government power display lower satisfaction with democracy, echoing the winner–loser gap documented among citizens. The second paper adjudicates between competing accounts of policy diffusion, demonstrating through field experiments in the United States and Germany that “learning from neighbors” is driven primarily by information availability rather than policy fit. The third paper,  based on survey experiments with Chilean officials, shows that vivid anecdotes systematically outweigh statistical information  in shaping elite evaluations, revealing how episodic cues distort policy judgment. The fourth paper examines elite responsiveness to lobbying, finding that Chilean politicians are equally persuaded by briefs attributed to interest groups as by those from trusted academic sources, despite rating the former as less credible. Together, these studies portray politicians as “ordinary minds in extraordinary positions”: decision-makers whose judgments are shaped by the same cognitive biases,  emotional reactions, and heuristics as those of the citizens they govern.