Understanding politicians’ attitudes to reusing built heritage: An experimental and behavioral approach

Across the globe, built heritage is being reused to serve specific policy goals of politicians. Such goals can include more efficiency, reusing built heritage to generate more income or reduce costs. They can also involve urban revitalization, reusing built heritage as community meeting centers for example. Noteworthy, decisions to reuse are not without controversy and have resulted in strong opposition from citizens and other societal actors. Within a political context, reusing historic buildings often serves different goals, which go beyond reasons of heritage preservation and protection. But which values drive politicians to make the decision to reuse built heritage? Are they influenced by economic, democratic or historical values? To answer this question, this paper engages in a survey experiment with 682 local politicians from Flanders (i.e. the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). In the experiment, a scenario is described where the local politician’s municipality is considering a potential reusing of a historic event hall as a movie theater (drawing from a real-world example).
Different valuation tools are linked to the scenario, which measure economic, democratic or historical values. Specifically, politicians are randomly assigned to one of seven groups: a control group which receives general information about the reuse case, and six treatment groups which receive the same information as the control group but the results of valuation tools are added: a cost-benefit analysis (economic value) supports or rejects the decision to reuse, a citizen survey (democratic value) supports or rejects the decision to reuse, or a consultation of academic heritage experts (historical value) supports or rejects the decision to reuse. Afterwards, all groups are asked to indicate the extent to which they feel the built heritage should be reused. A range of balance, manipulation and attention checks are also included, and the experimental design was pre-registered and ethically approved.
Results indicate that democratic values outweigh economic and historical ones, seemingly supporting the important role of citizens’ opinions in driving political behavior, compared to the role of more economic or scientific information. In line with behavioral economics and especially prospect theory, we also find that economic values only matter when they are negative – indicating a potential loss aversion and negativity bias among local politicians. These findings support an experimental and behavioral approach to cultural heritage and demonstrate the added value of survey experiments to elicit values preferences and causal mechanisms related to heritage decision-making by politicians and other stakeholders. © 2025 The Author(s).