Leadership, Followership, and Beliefs About the World: An Experiment

One key function of political leadership is to facilitate coordinated action by “followers.” The need to fulfill this function can affect leaders’ strategic incentives to depict the political world in one way as opposed to another when choosing political communications. This paper describes a laboratory experiment that was conducted to explore the effects of a leader’s communications on followers’ beliefs about the world. Interactions take place within a simple game-theoretic framework, in which a leader communicates with followers who are ex ante uncertain about the state of the world. In this framework, followers’ preferences over coordination outcomes are aligned in some states, but not in others. As a result, leaders sometimes have incentives to misrepresent the state of the world in order to make coordination more likely. The key experimental finding is that leaders’ communications strongly influence followers’ beliefs about the world even under conditions when Bayesian-rational followers would not find these communications to be credible; followers appear not fully to account for leaders’ strategic incentives to misrepresent the world in forming their posterior beliefs. This result suggests one mechanism through which members of different political groups may come to have different beliefs about the world.