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Politicians can sway voters through town hall events
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Issue
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Mar 19, 2015 11:16am |
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| Category | Study |
| Author | Scott K. Johnson |
| News Date | Thursday, March 19, 2015 04:05:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Through a survey, the researchers recruited people who were willing to participate in an online “town hall” experiment—and get $25 for their trouble. With the help of 12 congressmen who were coming up for election in 2006 (5 Republicans and 7 Democrats), they put on 19 of these town halls for groups of about 20 people from the Representatives’ districts. After the initial survey, subjects were sent some neutral, informative reading material on the topic to be discussed: immigration. Only half the subjects were then invited to join the town hall event, with the rest serving as a control group.
Those participating logged into a chat room where they could submit questions to their Representative, who spent about 35 minutes answering via phone (which was also live-captioned). Afterward, the participants were given some time to discuss what they had heard in a chat room.
All the subjects appeared to have picked up some information from the reading they were given, but the people who went through the town hall events were about 14 percent more likely to agree with their representative’s position on a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. On the “placebo” question of whether the number of legal immigrants we allow in should increase, the shift was just a few percent, with error bars straddling zero.
Trust and approval of the representative also increased by roughly 10 percent, and intent to vote for the representative went up around 14 percent. The number of people who actually voted for the representative was about 10 percent higher in the town hall attendees, though the error bars span from about -5 percent to +25 percent. |
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