American legislators are generally thought to be ideologues who take consistently partisan positions, but recent research suggests they are also pliant targets of persuasion campaigns by special interests, lobbyists, fellow legislators and even academics. This paper explores this seeming discrepancy. First, we revisit the credibility of findings of legislative persuasion to determine whether legislators' positions can be changed and, if so, whether such changes are robust and long-lasting. Second, we examine whether persuasion works against or alongside ideology. Finally, we interview legislators to hear their experiences as targets of persuasion. We conclude that legislative persuasion can be long-lasting and found on bills other than those targeted by advocates. Persuasion can increase ideological position-taking and polarization by allowing legislators to better sort into positions consistent with their broader ideology. Finally, persuasion works through different mechanisms, including learning about policy expertise or electoral considerations, that vary in relevance across legislators. Our findings suggest legislative persuasion may play a key role in how parties, interest groups and constituents drive polarization.

Policymakers are highly involved with political issues, politically polarized, and knowledgeable about politics, all traits that could contribute to biased reasoning about policy evidence. In this paper, we explore whether policymakers are influenced by compelling policy evidence from ideologically disparate viewpoints, or whether they respond to evidence in an ideologically biased fashion. We conduct an experiment in which we randomly assign a sample of local policymakers to policy-relevant evidence that varies in quality as well as in its ideological implications. We find that there is a positive, statistically significant effect of strong evidence on policymakers' attitudes and a smaller, positive (but not statistically significant) effect of weak evidence. We find no evidence of a moderating effect of ideology on the persuasive effects of either strong or weak evidence. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings as well as avenues for future research.

Research has shown that vivid exemplars bias risk perceptions, raising concerns about the role of media in shaping public opinion. However, receiver characteristics that moderate the influence of vivid exemplars remain understudied. We propose that insofar as exemplars in media portrayals represent (at times biased) samples of the population of events, inferential reasoning ability (IRA) - the knowledge of and skill at applying inferential and statistical principles - may enable people to avoid drawing invalid inferences from exemplars. In two message-exposure experiments employing different designs and stimulus materials, we find that exemplars conditionally influence perceptions of risk, depending on the receiver's IRA. Specifically, higher IRA was associated with reduced influence of vivid exemplars. This work highlights the importance of accounting for heterogeneous audiences in risk messaging and offers tools for measuring audience IRA.

Do policymaker perceptions reflect actual citizen needs? A vast literature has explored the extent to which policy is responsive to public opinion, but there is little systematic work on policymaker perceptions of social problems . We quantify social problems with a unique dataset of the number of phone calls placed by citizens to a free service that connects Michigan residents to service providers. We combine these data with a survey of local policymakers’ perceptions of social problems facing their own city shows, consistent with theories of bounded rationality, that policymakers use heuristics to make judgments about the extent of constituent needs in their city, and that policymaker perceptions reflect the prevalence of needs. However, partisan perceptions of needs diverge, with Democrats consistently perceiving greater needs than Republicans. There is no evidence that policy activity on the needs in the sample is responsive to constituent needs. We conclude with implications for theories of policy making and avenues for future research.

Recent work on misinformation has indicated a role for social and group-based factors in shaping people's beliefs on factual matters, suggesting that communicators might be able to leverage social cues in messages aimed at promoting more accurate beliefs. To test this possibility, we conducted an online experiment (N = 605) to assess whether partisan in-group cues across several factual claims are effective in either promoting more accurate beliefs independently or in reinforcing the effect of fact-checking messages. Results reveal that while factual messages consistently promote accurate beliefs, partisan in-group cues have neither a direct effect in promoting greater belief accuracy nor moderate the influence of factual messages. We discuss the implications of the results for theory and offer some practical implications.

Evidence of discrimination against African Americans, based on high-quality field experiments, has become clearer, easier to communicate, and harder to counterargue. In two experimental studies, we use this development to empirically evaluate two effects of evidence about discrimination. First, we test whether exposure to this evidence about discrimination against African Americans influences Whites' belief in discrimination and racial resentment, contributing to the scholarship on interventions to reduce prejudice. Second, we provide an experimental test to further explore observational studies showing that denial or downplaying of discrimination against African Americans influences vote choice in recent elections.

Scholars disagree about the ability of people to use heuristics to make political judgments, with some arguing that heuristics are easy-to-use pieces of information and others arguing that applying heuristics may require some degree of political expertise. We argue that these debates have been somewhat intractable because most prior work has not considered the ecological rationality of political judgments-that is, the potential for cues to yield accurate judgments about a clearly defined reference class. In this paper, we present the results of two studies exploring whether people use party labels to make judgments about a random sample of U.S. Representatives' voting behaviors. We find that respondents consistently performed worse in guessing U.S. Representatives' votes than if they had correctly used a simple partisan heuristic. There is also some evidence that people performed worse with the presence of more nonparty cues. Attention to politics had a positive relationship with accuracy in both studies, although the relationship was modest. The results suggest that party cues may be more difficult to apply than some research has suggested.

In experimental work, researchers have found that policymakers discount the opinions of constituents with whom they disagree. We build on these results with a national sample of local policymakers in the United States, exploring whether communicators can prevent policymakers from discounting their opinions by providing evidence of their own knowledge about a topic. We find that policymakers discount the opinions of hypothetical constituents with whom they disagree, but there is evidence that providing unambiguous evidence about a letter-writer's positive traits can reduce this discounting. We conclude with a discussion of implications for theory as well as practical implications for communicating with policymakers.

Prior work has found that early corrections are often more effective than corrections encountered sometime after exposure to misinformation. However, these studies have generally considered only brief delays between misinformation exposure and correction, and do not explore processing style as a potential moderator of correction timing. We conducted a two-wave online experiment randomly assigning participants to receive corrections either shortly after exposure or approximately one week later. We find that both immediate and delayed corrections influenced belief accuracy and policy support, but immediate corrections were no more influential than delayed corrections, contrary to earlier findings. In addition, processing style had no moderating effect on the influence of correction timing.

In a field experiment conducted during the 2012 general elections in the U.S., Nyhan and Reifler found that the threat of fact-checking deterred state legislators from making false or misleading statements. The current study presents a conceptual replication and extension of this influential study by utilizing a similar treatment that leverages a recent partnership between local media outlets and fact-checking organizations, assessing the effects of the treatment on the accuracy of legislators’ statements on Twitter around the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Results provide limited evidence of the effects of our treatment on the accuracy of legislators’ posts, even among legislators within media markets directly affected by this partnership. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical relevance of these results and avenues for future research.

Political scientists have proposed that party cues can be used to compensate for the public's well-documented lack of substantive political knowledge, but some critics have argued that applying party cues is more difficult than assumed. We argue that this debate has proven intractable in part because scholars have used ambiguous normative criteria to evaluate judgments. We use a unique task and clear normative criteria to evaluate the use of party cues in making political judgments among two samples: a sample of state legislators and an online sample of the public. We find that the public sample performs poorly when using cues to make judgments. State legislators make much more accurate judgments on average than even the most attentive segment of the public and are more likely to place less weight on irrelevant cues when making judgments, although there is evidence that both samples performed worse with the inclusion of non-diagnostic cues. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of the results, which we interpret as showing that party cue use is more difficult than theorized, and discuss some practical implications of the findings.

Research on misinformation and misperceptions often investigates claims that have already reached a critical mass, resulting in little understanding of why certain claims gain widespread belief while others fall into obscurity. Here we consider how various message features factor into why certain claims are more likely to be believed, perceived as credible, and shared with others. Using a conjoint experiment, we randomly assigned participants (N = 1,489) to receive an experimentally manipulated message describing an allegation of political misconduct. Results suggest that partisan cues play a significant role in influencing both belief and perceived credibility. Furthermore, message specificity, language intensity, and whether other users' comments on the post refute or endorse the post also influenced belief judgment and credibility assessments. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical importance of these findings for understanding and combating the threat of misinformation.

The current paper reviews recent and classic work on the role of mass media in campaigns, with a focus on television ads, and makes three main claims. The first is that there is rigorous evidence to show that the mass media can influence vote choice. However, a number of features of this effect have been debated, including the magnitude, heterogeneity, and duration of media effects. The second is that the context of the campaign influences the content of campaign ads, including the tone of ads (positive or negative) and the issue content of ads. The third is that although communication technology has evolved dramatically in recent years, the ability of campaigns to take advantage of this technology is limited, meaning that in order to be successful, campaigns must rely on mass media to disseminate messages with broad appeal.

While research consistently shows that fact-checking improves belief accuracy, debates persist about how to best measure and interpret expressions of factual beliefs. We argue that this has led to ambiguity in interpreting the results of studies on fact-checking, including whether fact-checking effects in fact decrease confidently held false beliefs. In a two-wave, nationally representative online experiment on beliefs about immigration, we use a variety of theoretically motivated approaches toward observing the influence of fact-checking messages. Results suggest that the effects of fact-checking are robust to different methods of measuring misinformed beliefs - even after accounting for belief certainty - and across different analytical approaches. Effects are evident among those who harbored inaccurate beliefs with high degrees of confidence. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future studies of corrections and practical implications for fact-checking efforts.

Recent work on voting behavior and political attitudes has established the relevance of anti-intellectual (Merkley, E. (2020). Anti-intellectualism, populism, and motivated resistance to expert consensus. Public Opinion Quarterly, 84(1), 24-48. doi: 10.1093/poq/nfz053; Motta, M. (2018a). The dynamics and political implications of anti-intellectualism in the United States. American Politics Research, 46(3), 465-498. doi: 10.1177/1532673X17719507; Motta, M. (2018b). The polarizing effect of the March for Science on attitudes toward scientists. PS, Political Science & Politics, 51(4), 782. doi: 10.1017/S1049096518000938), anti-science (Mede, N. G., & Schafer, M. S. (2020). Science-related populism: Conceptualizing populist demands toward science. Public Understanding of Science, 29(5), 473-491. doi: 10.1177/0963662520924259; Rekker, R. (2021). The nature and origins of political polarization over science. Public Understanding of Science, 30(4), 352-368. doi: 10.1177%2F0963662521989193) and anti-expertise (Brewer, M. D. (2016). Populism in American politics. The Forum, 14, 249-264. doi: 10.1515/for-2016-0021; Oliver, J. E., & Rahn, W. M. (2016). Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 Election. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 667(1), 189-206. doi: 10.1177/0002716216662639) attitudes in politics. However, the increasing relevance of anti-expertise attitudes raises a paradox, as one of the most well-established claims of the persuasion literature concerns the influence of expert sources on attitudes (O'Keefe, D. J. (2016). Persuasion: Theory and research. (3rd ed.) SAGE Publications, Inc.; Pornpitakpan, C. (2004). The persuasiveness of source credibility: A critical review of five decades' evidence. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 34, 243-281. doi: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2004.tb02547.x). The current paper explores the influence of messages based on public and expert consensus, as well as the interaction of these messages with expressed mistrust of experts relative to the public. The issue we explore concerns environmental regulations relating to water, an issue on which partisan elites are divided, but one that has not played a highly salient role in recent political discourse. We find that mistrust of experts is negatively related to support for these regulations, as expected, but that, contrary to prior research, increases in mistrust of experts in fact enhanced the impact of the expert message. We discuss potential explanations for why this pattern of results differs from prior work.

This chapter discusses the original research about social and democratic norms and the 2020 election, originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Political Marketing. The 2020 election and early 2021 saw events marking the erosion of democratic norms. In the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, then President Trump spread unfounded rumors about potential election fraud, culminating in widespread belief among Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen. The most prominent figure who violated democratic norms and spread misinformation about the 2020 election was undoubtedly the former president. Considering elites beyond the former president, experts have predicted increasing deployment of "constitutional hardball" tactics, including gerrymandering, refusing to certify election results, and increased restrictions on the vote. While the results are suggestive, future work should explore the relationship between affective polarization and support for the democratic norms.

Several extremely influential theories, including the multiple streams approach and punctuated equilibrium theory, predict that dramatic policy change occurs when problems are reframed. However, there is little direct evidence of how framing messages influence policymaker attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. In an online survey of local policymakers in Illinois, we find that different media frames of the opiate epidemic influence policymaker attitudes and attributions of responsibility. We conclude with some implications for framing theory and its role in theories of policymaking.

The influence of goals unrelated to accuracy - such as maintaining beliefs and attitudes consistent with one's political identity - may undermine objective processing, enabling people to construct defenses for their own predispositions. A two-wave study is employed involving undergraduates who experienced gains in scientific reasoning ability to explore the influence of ability on reasoning about social scientific messages that reflects positively or negatively on affiliates of the two major U.S. political parties. Results suggest that although ability contributes to distinguishing strong from weak arguments, there is no evidence that ability either enhances or decreases partisan influences on research evaluation.

Much scholarly attention has been paid to the effects of misinformation on beliefs and attitudes, but rarely have studies investigated potential downstream effects of misinformation exposure on belief judgments involving subsequent factual statements. Drawing from work on anchoring-and-adjustment and defensive reasoning, this study examines how exposure to initial falsehoods that vary in terms of their plausibility shapes subsequent belief judgments. Across two survey experiments, we find that initial exposure to a less plausible statement decreases belief in subsequent statements, whether true or false. This order effect has implications for misinformation research, as studies examining audience responses to a single falsehood may fail to capture the full range of misinformation effects. Other implications are discussed in this article.