The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Recent research suggests that psychological needs can influence the political attitudes of ordinary citizens, often outside of their conscious awareness. In this paper, we investigate whether psychological needs also shape the spending priorities of political elites in the US. Most models of policymaking assume that political elites respond to information in relatively homogeneous ways. We suggest otherwise, and explore one source of difference in information processing, namely, threat sensitivity, which previous research links to increased support for conservative policy attitudes. Drawing on a sample of state-level policymakers, we measure their spending priorities using a survey and their level of threat sensitivity using a standard psychophysiological measure (skin conductance). We find that, like ordinary citizens, threat sensitivity leads even state-level policymakers to prioritize spending on government polices that are designed to minimize threats.
Democracies are supposed to produce policies that align with the public’s preferences. Although the ideal form of democracy provides ordinary citizens direct control over policy and governance, in most modern democracies policy making is left to politicians and their staffs. In recognition of the public’s putative centrality in democratic governance, studies of policymaking treat politicians and their staff as well-honed, career-minded machines who strategically select behavioral responses to electorally created incentives [
It is, therefore, crucial to understand how politicians form policy preferences. Canonical models of policymaking presume that policymakers process information in a uniform fashion—given the same facts, they should reach the same conclusions. Differences in preferences, then, should simply reflect differences in political philosophies. However, recent research shows that psychological biases are more important for elite decision making than canonical models of policymaking presume [
According to decades of research, ordinary people do not process information uniformly. Differences in genetics coupled with early life experiences lead to differences in the architecture of brain and, thus, the way in which people process external information [
This research was approved by Texas A&M IRB and was administered by Professor Johanna Dunaway who is on faculty at Texas A&M.
We extend this line of research to the study of policymakers in the United States. We are aware of no study that investigates this central claim. Although one study shows that center-right political elites in Iceland offered more conservative policy opinions when induced to feel threat [
The survey asked policymakers to indicate what percent of their state budget they would devote to six policy domains that consistently divide liberals and conservatives: assistance to the poor, elementary and secondary education, counter-terrorism, health care, higher education, and police and public safety. Four of these tend to be liberal priorities: spending on education, higher education, health and the poor; two others tend to be conservative priorities: spending on defense and terror. Our measure of spending preferences captures the conservative-liberal difference by asking policymakers to indicate the percent of the state budget they would allocate to each domain; and then capturing policymakers’ spending priorities by taking the average spending preference on the two conservative priorities and subtracting from it the average spending preference on the four liberal priorities. We find suggestive evidence that threat sensitivity correlates with a preference for devoting a higher portion of the state budget to conservative spending priorities vis-a-vis liberal ones (
Although the six policies that are part of this general measure clearly relate to conservative-liberal policy priorities, we expect that some are at best only loosely related to threat sensitivity. Pushing beyond these preliminary but suggestive findings, then, we focused the analysis on the degree to which policymakers prioritize spending on counterterrorism to spending on assistance to the poor. We do so for three reasons. First, these policy domains are primarily national, not state-level, and, therefore, do not differ widely across states. Second, these issues lie at the center of partisan polarization in the US that previous scholars have traced to differences in threat sensitivity [
The results reported in
Spending on Terror—Poor Issues | ||
---|---|---|
(1) | (2) | |
Threat Sensitivity | 76.865 |
76.151 |
(33.519) | (32.386) | |
Democrat | −8.696 |
|
(3.846) | ||
Republican | 1.684 | |
(4.925) | ||
Constant | −13.676 |
−8.672 |
(1.741) | (3.387) | |
Observations | 102 | 102 |
R2 | 0.050 | 0.131 |
Adjusted R2 | 0.040 | 0.105 |
Residual Std. Error | 16.040 (df = 100) | 15.494 (df = 98) |
F Statistic | 5.259 |
4.935 |
Note:
* p<0.05;
** p<0.01;
*** p<0.001
We regard the tradeoff between counterterrorism and welfare as the most relevant for our purposes, but note that our results are not dependent on these two domains alone. One obvious change is to replace counterterrorism with crime prevention. There will more regional variation in crime-related spending; and crime prevention is less directly connected to threat sensitivity in the existing literature. Even so, results using this slightly revised measure produce roughly similar results. We include those results in Table C in
The empirical evidence that we present suggests that the genesis of policy elites’ spending preferences is more complicated than theoretical models assume. When these individuals are making budgetary tradeoffs, threat sensitivity correlates with prioritizing spending on counter-terrorism to welfare spending—the classic guns versus butter tradeoff.
These findings challenge the notion that elites’ preferences can be simply reduced to strategically selecting behavioral responses to environmentally created incentives as well as the notion that strong incentives for policy elites to be cold and calculating obviates the influence of psychological needs. Instead we find that, like ordinary citizens, threat sensitivity plays an important role in state-level policymakers decisions to prioritize spending on government polices that are designed to minimize threats. To be clear, this is not to say that these elites are not being “rational.” They could certainly be behaving rationally in the sense that they are connecting their psychological needs in a logical way to their policy preferences [
Like all studies, ours has several limitations. First, in order to preserve anonymity, we did not collect personal information about these participants, such as the districts that they represent. It could be that particular constituencies elect representatives with psychological needs that mirror the modal member of their district. If so, it would support an “electoral connection” between constituents and representatives [
Furthermore, more research is needed regarding the psychophysiological measurement of threat sensitivity and, more generally, negativity bias in this domain of political science. We chose images that would directly tap into threat and, therefore, feelings of anxiety and fear. However, other researchers have used a variety of images to tap threat sensitivity that may also tap into disgust [
Despite these limitations, we believe that our study makes an important contribution to the study of elite behavior. Scholars should take the psychological needs of policymakers more seriously. In short, we find that policymakers are people, too. Additional research should be directed at understanding the conditions that moderate and mediate the influence of psychological needs on elite decision making and behavior.
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We thank Dan Butler and the