Replication Data for: Re-Assessing Elite-Public Gaps in Political Behavior

Political scientists often criticize psychological approaches to the study of politics on the grounds that many psychological theories were developed on convenience samples of college students or members of the mass public, whereas many of the most important decisions in politics are made by elites, who are presumed to differ systematically from ordinary citizens. This paper proposes an overarching conceptual framework for thinking about psychological differences between elites and masses, presenting the results of a meta-analysis of 162 paired treatments from paired experiments on political elites and mass publics, as well as an analysis of 12 waves of historical elite and mass public opinion data on foreign policy issues over a 43 year period. It finds political scientists both overstate the magnitude of elite-public gaps in decision-making, and misunderstand the determinants of elite-public gaps in political attitudes - much of which are due to basic compositional differences rather than to elites' domain-specific expertise.

政治学者时常批判政治学研究中的心理学研究路径，其依据在于，多数心理学理论均依托大学生或普通大众的便利抽样样本构建，而政治领域诸多核心决策均由精英群体作出——学界普遍认定精英与普通公民存在系统性差异。本文提出了一套用于探析精英与大众心理差异的统合性概念框架，并呈现两项实证分析成果：一是针对162组面向政治精英与普通大众的配对实验中的配对处理的元分析，二是针对43年间12轮涉及外交政策议题的历史精英与大众民意调查数据的分析。研究表明，政治学者既高估了决策层面精英-大众差距的幅度，也误判了政治态度层面精英-大众差距的成因——此类差距多源于基础的群体构成差异，而非精英在对应领域的专属专业能力。