How politicians change voters' minds

University of California - Berkeley's David Broockman and Washington University's Daniel Butler enlisted state legislators in an experiment. They had the legislators randomly alert their constituents of opinions that the constituents likely didn't share, and then watched to see how the constituents' views changed.

They found that opinion change was no more likely when an extensive argument was included in the letter; the legislators aren't persuading people with reason and evidence, but with the bare fact that they're the ones holding the positions in question. And legislators didn't suffer a loss in support from constituents they didn't convince: "citizens who received letters from their legislators taking positions they had disagreed with previously evaluated their legislators no less favorably." And while responses to the letters varied for different issue areas, they didn't differ so much that the results were "driven by a small set of atypical issues."