listener-first

Foundation

Two large field syntheses set the expectation for everything below.

• Across 49 field experiments, the best estimate of the persuasive effect of campaign contact — mail, calls, canvassing — on candidate choice in US general elections is zero (Kalla & Broockman 2018). The same paper does find clear effects in primaries and ballot-measure campaigns, where voters have no party cue to fall back on.
• Behavioral interventions run by two government nudge units moved outcomes by 1.4 percentage points; a separate set of academically published nudges reports 8.7. Publication bias, exacerbated by low power, accounts for the entire gap (DellaVigna & Linos 2022, 126 RCTs, 23 million people).