A Field Experiment on Policy Information Sharing among Politicians

• In Event: Experiments with Political Elites

Abstract

Existing research helps us to understand how politicians seek to learn about policies from their peers — highlighting the roles of ideology, geographical proximity, and the level of democracy (Butler et al 2017, Sebhatu et al 2020, Pereira 2021, DellaVigna and Kim 2022). However, we have limited knowledge about how willing politicians are to share policy information with each other in the first place, as these interactions are usually unobserved. We present results from a field experiment that aims to investigate the supply side of policy diffusion, focusing on whether and to what extent do politicians share policy ideas with one another upon request. In collaboration with Danish candidates participating in the upcoming European Parliament election in 2024, we randomize their actual characteristics as email senders who seek opinions on policy problems from their counterparts in various other European countries. We pre-register hypotheses concerning the influence of alignment in partisanship and social identity between senders and receivers on the likelihood and quality of responses. In summary, our study seeks to break new ground, examining the dynamics of the supply side of policy diffusion in a real-world electoral context.

Authors

• Roman Senninger, Aarhus University

• Muzhou Zhang, Aarhus University