The parliamentary candidate as persuader: Evidence from randomized candidate-voter interactions Florian Foos∗† Abstract Despite a renewed focus on electoral persuasion and principal-agent problems in ground campaigns, the role of parliamentary candidates in persuading voters has received little attention. Candidates should be effective persuaders because they can control the message, and persuasion is a key skill required in being selected as a candidate. Nevertheless, robust causal evidence on parliamentary candidates’ abilities to influence opinion formation is rare. Drawing on two randomized field experiments, a telephone survey, and an extensive panel dataset of individual voting intentions collected by the UK Labour Party, I show that introduction letters and personal meetings with a parliamentary candidate affected voting intentions. Initially, one in ten voters switched their voting preferences in the desired direction after interacting with the candidate. Effects persisted for up to six months, but decayed over time. This study provides new insights into the short- and long-term effects of candidate-voter interactions during a general election campaign. 10976 words ∗Lecturer in Politics, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London
[email protected], www.florianfoos.net †I would like to thank former Labour Parliamentary candidate Rowenna Davis, as well as Marcus Roberts for working with me on the two persuasion experiments in Southampton Itchen, and the Labour Contact Creator, Targeting, and Analysis Team, particularly Tim Waters and Isabel Taylor, for sharing the time-stamped outcome data with me. Moreover, I am grateful to Christian Müller for excellent research assistance, to Richard Speight and Elisabeth Jackson for help with data management and data entry during the experiments, and to Beverly Boos, Eliza Galos, Clare Ford, Donald Holbrook, Richard Johnson, Ben Sayah, Paul Stoddart, Zsuzsi Szollosi, Silas Walton and George Wood for conducting the telephone survey.