Beyond the Mean: How Thinking About The Distribution of Public Opinions Reduces Politicians' Perceptual Errors

Recent studies find that elected politicians regularly over-estimate the conservatism of their constituents’ preferences. While these findings have potentially concern- ing implications for democratic representation, they depend on the magnitude and sources of this ‘conservative over-estimation,’ neither of which is well-understood. Here, we show that a novel approach to measuring politicians’ perceptions—whereby politicians draw the distribution of their constituents’ positions, rather than pro- vide a point estimate—clarifies the magnitude and sources of politicians’ perceptual errors. While the vast majority of politicians in our sample exhibit a conservative bias, our ‘perceived-distribution’ task cuts the size of this bias in half. Exploring how politicians build out public-opinion distributions, we further show that conser- vative over-estimation is counterbalanced by projection effects among politicians on the left, but that projection among politicians on the right reinforces it. Our re- sults raise questions about existing accounts of elite misperception and help identify cognitive sources of the conservative over-estimation.