HIGH-RISK POLITICS: Explaining and improving political actors decision-making on electorally risky issues

Politics often involves high risks. Increasing the pension age or intervening miliary, for instance, likely leads to losing votes or office. Moreover, political parties changing their policy position risk turning their voters away. The degree to which political actors take such electoral risks varies substantially. How to explain these varying attitudes towards risk? Existing explanations emphasizing, for example, partisanship or institutions are unable to explain this variation. Deepening and broadening my earlier work and taking up recent advances in behavioral economics, the proposed programs overall aim is to advance and test a theory of political decision-making under risk that holds on the individual level, the meso level (parties), and the macro level (governments). I draw on and develop prospect theory, which predicts that people take risk-averse decisions when facing gains while they are risk-seeking or acceptant when confronting losses. Objective 1 is to experimentally test to what extent (groups of) politicians display the same attitude towards risk as "normal" individuals do, i.e., whether prospect theorys predictions hold. Objective 2 is to establish empirically why some political parties risk turning their constituency away by changing their policy position on salient topics, but others do not. Objective 3 is to assess empirically why some governments take decisions involving substantial electoral risks while others do not. One post-doc, two PhDs and I answer the research questions through a series of quantitative, qualitative and experimental techniques. The program results in: 1) detailed empirical knowledge on how different kinds of gains and losses shape political actors decision-making under risk. This knowledge will also be of interest to policymakers responsible for designing electorally hazardous policies. It 2) enables "better" decision-making through improved understanding of actors behavior. It 3) produces a widely applicable theory. Finally, 4) it offers methodological advances by combining and confronting different state-of-the-art techniques.