Political elites must regularly make predictions, i.e., assessments about the future. In the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, they for instance had to predict the likeliness that a vaccine would be available soon. Research shows that people in general are poor at making predictions and suggests that political elites may even be worse. Yet, we lack systematic knowledge of how political elites make predictions in real-world situations, and which factors influence this. Overconfidence, which occurs when someone’s subjective confidence in the own judgment is substantially greater than the judgment’s objective accuracy, may be important but this factor to date is rarely examined in this context.

This paper explores how political elites make predictions about the future, paying specific attention to the role of overconfidence, through an explorative case study of the judgment and decision making by Dutch political elites during the Covid-19 pandemic between January 2020 and December 2021. Methodologically, I will use both dictionary-based and qualitative text analysis approaches to analyze press conferences, parliamentary debates, and interviews. First empirical findings reveal that political elites regularly display overconfidence in their predictions of the development of the pandemic. Theoretically, I argue that this is especially problematic when situations are characterized by manifold unknowns, ambiguity and vagueness that cannot be resolved with more or better information (radical uncertainty). Hereby, this study makes an empirical and theoretical contribution to the literature on political elites’ judgment and decision making under uncertainty.