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Insights from the Field

Campaign Contact Fails to Persuade: 49 Field Experiments Show Minimal Impact in General Elections


Field Experiments
General Elections
Campaign Contact
Persuasive Effects
Voting and Elections
APSR
16 R files
2 Stata files
20 datasets
13 PDF files
2 text files
Dataverse
The Minimal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments was authored by Joshua Kalla and David E. Broockman. It was published by Cambridge in APSR in 2018.

New research challenges conventional wisdom about political campaigns. By synthesizing evidence from both meta-analysis and nine original field experiments, this paper demonstrates that campaign contact has little persuasive effect on voters' candidate choices during general elections. Most studies find no impact at all - the average effect is effectively zero across 49 total field experiments. The exceptions to this pattern occur only under very specific circumstances: when candidates hold unusually unpopular positions or campaigns make extraordinary efforts targeting persuadable voters, and even then early persuasion fades over time unless measured immediately before elections. This finding contributes significantly to ongoing debates about democratic accountability by suggesting political elites' attempts to influence voters may be less effective than commonly believed.

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