David Lazer is distinguished professor at Northeastern University, visiting scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, and founder of VolunteerScience.com. Michael Neblo is associate professor of political science at Ohio State University.

In politics, it’s become conventional wisdom that talking seriously to regular Americans doesn’t really pay off. Numerous studies have found that citizens appear to dig in their heels, resisting information that contradicts their beliefs—if they’re informed enough to have meaningful beliefs in the first place. When politicians talk to voters, the goal is usually to rev up their base, or shift a tiny wedge of the “undecided,” rather to genuinely persuade a broad swath of the public.

This might be a discouraging view of how politics works, but it’s also seen as realistic. If Americans aren’t persuadable, there’s little sense in members of Congress wasting their time trying to have meaningful conversations about the future of the country.


This view is also mostly wrong.

We know because we ran the first large randomized experiment to test this question, bringing members of Congress together with samples of their constituents. Our findings suggest that it might be time for politicians and their handlers to re-think how they deal with voters, and even potential voters.

Like everyone interested in politics, we’d seen a lot of town hall meetings, and noticed that they tend to either break down in shouting, or be so stage-managed they never really generate a real conversation. Our suspicion was that much of the dysfunction stemmed from the events themselves, which tend to draw from very strong partisans on both sides. So we set out to study whether a differently structured meeting might have different results. With a random sample of the public and neutral moderators, could members of Congress actually persuade citizens to change their opinions on hot policy issues through substantive discussion? We also wondered whether the politicians could win over their constituents on a personal level, even earn their votes.

If so, maybe it would be worth everyone’s time to talk.

With the help of the Congressional Management Foundation, we worked with 12 sitting United States representatives and one senator, both Republicans and Democrats. We recruited a random sample of each congressperson’s constituents to participate, and randomly assigned some to talk about important issues (immigration reform and anti-terrorism policy) with their member online in small groups. We also had a “control group”—citizens who just read the briefing materials that we prepared for the sessions, but didn’t participate in a conversation. The events were online and lasted roughly an hour each, with constituents typing in their questions and the members replying via voice. We recently published the results in a paper with William Minozzi and Kevin Esterling in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Judging by the town-hall shouting matches that one sees on TV, you might expect that our events would just recycle the same incivility and partisan red-meat. What we found, however, was entirely different. The discussions were remarkably civil and substantive. We surveyed the constituents and the members before and after the events, and found that members of Congress actually had persuaded their constituents about the merits of their views on the policy issues. They also rated their members as much more trustworthy, qualified and accessible. Even months later, the participants were about 10 percent more likely to vote for their member. Remarkably, the members were persuasive not only to people from their own party, but to those from the opposing party as well.

There are other, broader benefits to serious conversations between voters and their representatives. For example, in previous research we found that participants learned a lot about the policy discussed (and politics more generally), and felt more engaged with the political process. The sessions also help the politicians: The town-hall participants were more likely to talk about the policy and their member of Congress with friends and family and were vastly more likely to report trying to persuade others to vote for the member. They were more likely to vote, and were more likely to pay attention to the election.

This wasn’t because participants were docile, or pushovers. Sometimes sharp disagreements emerged, but they remained consistently civil and substantive. In short, they looked much more like the version of democracy you might see in a civics textbook than the kind that you might see on the news.

They looked different in part because different people showed up to our events. Standard town-halls tend to draw very strong partisans, the kind that already love rough and tumble politics. Our sessions were much more representative of average citizens. Indeed our participants were more representative of eligible voters than actual voters!

The vast majority of citizens in our study said they’d like to participate in more events like this. Moreover, all of these findings scaled up: The session with the U.S. senator had almost 10 times the number of citizens as the sessions with House members, but the pattern of results was very similar. So the benefits of substantive policy discussion between citizens and elected representatives are real and within reach.

On a practical level, we estimate that if members of the House spent as little as two hours per week doing this kind of outreach they could have more meaningful interactions with almost half of the eligible voters in their districts in the course of a couple of terms—and, very likely, enjoy the payoffs we documented.

In short, the members in our study did well by doing right. The takeaway here for politicians is clear: Make special efforts to talk to all of your constituents. It’s good for your own political prospects, and it’s good for democracy.