POLITICO: So what do elite experiments tell us about the role of elites in American politics?

Kertzer: Most of our theories of politics in democracies emphasize this notion that there’s public opinion: Our political leaders are paying attention to public opinion, and they’re forming policy as a result. But one thing that these elite experiments are really good at showing is that oftentimes elites are actually misinformed about what the public wants — that elites are fundamentally misreading the room. So in the context of American politics, there are experiments where you go to state legislators, and you tell them more about what their constituents actually think about given issues, and you see if it affects their political behavior. Similarly, in a foreign policy context, there are researchers who have done lots of great studies where they correct misperceptions about what the public wants and see how that affects elite decision-making.

There are a bunch of regularities that folks doing this kind of research have noticed. For example, the public is much more likely to believe that global warming exists, that climate change is real and that it is being caused by human beings than elites think the public believes. Similarly, elites tend to have this assumption that the public is much more isolationist in foreign policy than the public actually is.