Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bergan, Daniel E.
• Cole, Richard T.

Titel

Call Your Legislator: A Field Experimental Study of the Impact of a Constituency Mobilization Campaign on Legislative Voting

Ist Teil von

• Political behavior, 2015-03, Vol.37 (1), p.27-42

Ort / Verlag

Boston: Springer Science+Business Media LLC

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Do campaigns encouraging constituents to contact their legislator influence public policy? We answer this question with a field experiment in which Michigan state legislators are randomly assigned to be contacted by their constituents about a specific bill or to a control group. The field experimental design allows us to produce internally and externally valid estimates of the effects on legislative voting of a campaign in which constituents are urged to contact their legislator. The estimated effect is substantial: being targeted by constituent contacts increases the probability of supporting the relevant legislation by about 12 percentage points. We discuss the normative and theoretical implications of these results.