William Minozzi

A Jamming Theory of Politics

Competitive political elites frequently offer conflicting, irreconcilable accounts of policy-relevant information. This presents a problem for members of the public who lack the skill, time, and attention to become experts on every complicated policy question that might arise. To analyze problems like these, this article presents a formal theory of political communication with competitive senders who have privately known preferences. In equilibrium, senders can jam messages from their opponents; that is, they can send messages designed to leave receivers uncertain about who has sent a truthful message. The article identifies differences between jamming and existing theories, reports empirical predictions, and discusses substantive implications for the politics of representation, the judiciary, and expertise.

Who Heeds the Call of the Party in Congress

When party leaders seek support, who heeds the call and who remains unswayed? The canonical error-free spatial model of voting predicts the targeting of fence-sitting moderates. In contrast, we advance a random-utility-based model of party calls, wherein legislators who benefit the most from a common party position respond to the call of party leaders. This model predicts that extremists will heed the call of the party more than moderates, even upon controlling for baseline rates of voting with the party. To test this prediction, we develop a new method to identify “party-influenced votes,” to generate estimates of “party-free ideal points,” and to examine rates of responsiveness to political parties across members in the House of Representatives between 1973 and 2006. We find that, contrary to common portrayals of party influence, those most responsive to their parties are not the chamber moderates. Rather, responsiveness is greatest for ideological extremists in both the majority and minority parties, declining significantly among more moderate members. This finding sets the stage for new theoretical and empirical work on the role of parties in Congress.

Field experiment evidence of substantive, attributional, and behavioral persuasion by members of Congress in online town halls

Significance Persuasion is at the core of leadership, especially in a democracy, yet there is remarkably little evidence that direct appeals from leaders causally affect the attitudes and behaviors of their followers. The available evidence is either observational and indirect or based on laboratory experiments that simulate selected features of interactions with leaders. We fill this void with two randomized controlled field experiments in which 12 US representatives and a senator each met with samples of their constituents in online town halls. We find evidence of substantial persuasion effects on specific policy issues, attributions of trust and approval, and ultimately the decision to vote for the leader. Do leaders persuade? Social scientists have long studied the relationship between elite behavior and mass opinion. However, there is surprisingly little evidence regarding direct persuasion by leaders. Here we show that political leaders can persuade their constituents directly on three dimensions: substantive attitudes regarding policy issues, attributions regarding the leaders’ qualities, and subsequent voting behavior. We ran two randomized controlled field experiments testing the causal effects of directly interacting with a sitting politician. Our experiments consist of 20 online town hall meetings with members of Congress conducted in 2006 and 2008. Study 1 examined 19 small meetings with members of the House of Representatives (average 20 participants per town hall). Study 2 examined a large (175 participants) town hall with a senator. In both experiments we find that participating has significant and substantively important causal effects on all three dimensions of persuasion but no such effects on issues that were not discussed extensively in the sessions. Further, persuasion was not driven solely by changes in copartisans’ attitudes; the effects were consistent across groups.

Lying aversion, lobbying, and context in a strategic communication experiment

Almost all institutions within modern democracies depend on a mix of communication and competition. However, most formal theory and experimental evidence ignores one of these two features. We present a formal theory of communicative competition in which senders vary in their aversion to lying, and test hypotheses from this theory using a strategic communication experiment. To influence lying aversion, we compare a Context Condition, in which pre-play instructions are cast in political language, with a Baseline Condition, in which all language is abstract. We find that in early rounds of play, subjects in the Context Condition exaggerated more as a function of their biases than those in the Baseline Condition when we control for the past history of play. However, by the last round of play, subjects in both conditions converged on persistent exaggeration. This finding indicates that competition crowds outlying aversion in settings of strategic communication.

The need for a translational science of democracy

The political science community should focus on how to foster the health of democracy The bitterly factious 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign was the culmination of several trends that, taken together, constitute a syndrome of chronic ailments in the body politic. Ironically, these destructive trends have accelerated just as science has rapidly improved our understanding of them and their underlying causes. But mere understanding is not sufficient to repair our politics. The challenge is to build a translational science of democracy that maintains scientific rigor while actively promoting the health of the body politic.

Conditions for Dialogue and Dominance in Political Campaigns

When do competing candidates campaign on the same issues rather than play to their reputational strengths on issues they own? This article develops a theory of conditional convergence, in which a races competitiveness and the salience of an issue combine to alter whether candidates campaign on issues that they do not own. To test this theory, I focus on advertising in three election cycles for the U.S. House and Senate and use new methods to measure issue salience at the district and state levels. The analyses indicate that the previous null findings in studies of ownership and convergence result from a failure to account for ownerships dynamic interaction with salience and competitiveness.

Party Calls and Reelection in the US Senate

Minozzi and Volden advance the idea that a substantial portion of partisan voting activity in Congress is a simple call to unity that is especially easily embraced by ideological extremists. If correct, Minozzi and Volden’s findings should extend from the House to the Senate, despite differences in institutional structures and in tools at the disposal of party leaders across the two chambers. We adapt the theory and measurement of party calls to the Senate. In so doing, we find that both the House and the Senate have relied heavily (and increasingly) on party calls over the past four decades. In the Senate in particular, the lens of party calls opens new opportunities for scholars to explore partisan legislative behavior. We take advantage of one such opportunity to show how electoral concerns limit senators’ responsiveness to party calls, depriving party leaders of support for their agenda items.