Many, if not most, phenomena faced by political elites are characterized by uncertainty. This characterization also holds for the concept uncertainty itself, with conceptualizations and operationalizations differing both across and within bodies of scholarship. The conceptual vagueness poses a challenge to the accumulation of knowledge. To address this challenge, we integrate and expand existing work and develop an uncertainty grid to map phenomena (e.g., Covid-19; digitalization) or aspects thereof (e.g., vaccines; generative Artificial Intelligence [AI]). The uncertainty grid includes both the nature of a phenomenon’s uncertainty (epistemic and/or aleatory) and its level and enables labeling phenomena as certain, resolvably uncertain, or radically uncertain. We demonstrate the utility of the uncertainty grid by mapping the development of uncertainty during the Covid-19 pandemic onto it. Moreover, we discuss how researchers can use the grid to develop testable hypotheses regarding political elites’ behavior in response to uncertain phenomena.

The relationship between parliaments and governments during the Covid-19 pandemic has been closely examined by various disciplines, which have typically analysed data on the laws and procedures enforced to manage the emergency. This literature generally agrees that the government dominated the management of the pandemic, often at the expense of parliamentary prerogatives. However, such data may not be sufficiently detailed to fully grasp some nuances. Above all, they may provide limited information on the factors that influenced the balance of powers between the two institutions. This article focuses on the Italian case. It complements data on legislation with the findings of semi-structured interviews conducted with members of parliament and government, as well as high-ranking bureaucrats, to gain a more in-depth understanding of these processes. The data on legislation suggest that governmental dominance was strong at every stage of the emergency, although parliament slightly regained some prerogatives over time. This recovery began under Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, but it became more pronounced under Mario Draghi. The acquisition of knowledge about the pandemic was perceived by several interviewees as a factor that helped parliament regain some control, making it a possible outcome of a policy learning process. However, other factors also emerged as significant, such as the direct role of the prime ministers in strengthening the role of the executive and the difficulties of the technocratic members of the government in navigating parliamentary dynamics during Draghi’s tenure.

A key challenge when surveying political elites is recruitment. Low response rates can lead to biased samples and underpowered designs, threatening the validity of descriptive and experimental scholarship. In a randomized control trial, we test the effects of sending postal invitations in a large survey of local elected officials. We find that German and UK local politicians are more likely to complete the survey if invited by postal mail, rather than simply by email. Recruitment mode does not impact the quality of responses but shapes the population of local officials recruited. Officials invited via postal letter were more likely to come from smaller municipalities and less likely to have a college degree. Costs per response are relatively high but can be reduced as we learn more about selection into elite surveys.

The rise of constraining dissensus is widely regarded by scholars as a pivotal shift for European integration, highlighting an increasing gap between pro-European political elites and a more sceptical public. Italy emerges as a case of particular interest with regard to this phenomenon, as its longstanding pro-Europeanism eventually gave way to a major Eurosceptic turn during the 2010s. Despite the extensive literature on EU mass-elite congruence, the overall comparative longitudinal evidence on this opinion gap remains limited. To address this issue, the article uses a multi-level model for a mass-elite congruence analysis relying on data from eight surveys conducted between 1979 and 2016. Our findings provide innovative evidence of a double-sided gap: overall, political elites from pro-European parties are significantly more supportive of European integration than their voters, whereas the reverse holds true for Eurosceptics. However, this pattern does not hold for Italy, where a comparatively higher mass-elite alignment on European integration sets the country apart as an outlier within the broader European context.

This article describes the Global Legislators Database, a new cross-national dataset on the characteristics – party affiliation, gender, age, education, and occupational background – of nearly 20,000 national parliamentarians in the world’s democracies. The database includes 97 electoral democracies with comprehensive information on legislators who held office in each country’s lower or unicameral chamber during one legislative session in 2015, 2016, or 2017. The GLD is the largest individual-level biographical and demographic database on national legislators ever assembled, with a wide range of potential applications. In this article, we provide multiple types of validity checks of the GLD to document the integrity of the data. We also preview three potential applications of the dataset and note other possible uses for this one-of-a-kind resource for studying representation in the world’s democracies.

How elected representatives think about public opinion affects the degree to which policies are congruent with the public’s policy preferences. This is especially true for politicians occupying leadership positions, their perceptions matter even more. Extant work concluded that politicians in general do not exhibit a high perceptual accuracy, but direct evidence of the relative accuracy of leaders’ perceptions of public opinion is missing. Drawing on surveys among politicians and citizens in four countries, this study examines the accuracy of the public opinion perceptions of leaders and backbenchers. Irrespective of how leadership is defined and operationalized – executive or party leadership, formal or informal leadership, current or past leadership – we find low perceptual accuracy levels among leading politicians. Compared to backbenchers, and although politicians themselves consider leaders to have a special nose for public opinion, leading politicians do not possess a special public opinion rating skill.

Since 1974, two out of every five constitutions (40.3%) were prepared via processes that included public consultation. The reasons for adopting these participatory mechanisms, however, are largely unexplored. I argue that public consultation is a tool for elite contestation of power. Introducing an original dataset of public consultations in constitution-making processes from 1974–2021 (n = 300), I find that in democracies, factional majorities and newcomer elites use public consultation to legitimate a break from the status quo. In autocracies, governing coalitions that depend on performance and enjoy greater party institutionalization push for public consultation to preserve favorable power-sharing arrangements.

Using a unique dataset of legislators' electoral and biographical data in the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and the federal parliament, this article analyses the extent to which family dynasties affected the career development of legislators since the mid-18th century. We find that the prevalence of dynasties was higher in provincial legislatures than it was in the federal parliament, that the number of dynasties in the Senate increased until the mid-20th century, and that the proportion of dynastic legislators at the subnational level was similar to the numbers seen in the United Kingdom during the early 19th century. Our results confirm the existence of a clear career benefit in terms of cabinet and senate appointments. In contrast to the American case and in line with the United Kingdom experience, we find no causal relationship between a legislator's tenure length and the presence of a dynasty.

One of the most persistent challenges in the study of regional politics in Italy is the lack of systematized data and information about the composition of regional legislatures and governments and the profiles of elected officials. In this paper, we describe the ITREGPARL dataset, a new comprehensive dataset of Italian regional politics comprising 6077 regional politicians from 1993 to 2020. It includes information about regional councillors, regional ministers, presidents and vice-presidents of the regional council, regional presidents and vice-presidents. Along with socio-demographic characteristics – gender, age, previous profession, education – it includes data such as experience and incumbency, number of mandates, length of service and partisanship. It also includes region-level variables, such as geographical area, type of gender quotas and the regional authority index.

Politicians are exposed to a constant flow of information about societal problems. However, they have limited resources and need to prioritize. So, which information should they pay attention to? Previous research identifies four types of information that may matter: public concern about a problem, problem attention by rival parties, news stories about problems, and statistical problem indicators. We are the first to contrast the four types of information through a field experiment with more than 6,000 candidates and multiple elite interviews in Denmark. The candidates received an email invitation to access a specially tailored report that randomly highlighted one of the four types of information. Statistical indicators and public opinion were accessed the most (26.9 per cent and 26.5 per cent of candidates in the two conditions). Our results provide new and important evidence about the types of information politicians consider when addressing societal problems.

Politicians often oppose economic policies benefiting low-income Americans. However, the mechanisms behind this political inequality are unclear. I ask whether politicians oppose these policies, in part, because they underestimate how many of those they govern are struggling financially. I test this theory with an original survey of 1,265 state legislative candidates. Contrary to my expectations, I find that politicians tend to overestimate how many of those they govern are struggling financially. At the same time, there are some instances in which politicians—and Republicans in particular—do underestimate the level of financial hardship among those they govern. In an experiment, I randomly assign politicians to have their misperceptions corrected. The results suggest that politicians' policy preferences would be similar even if they had a more accurate understanding of reality. Overall, the findings suggest that politicians may frequently misperceive the state of reality in which those they govern live.