On the face of it, the goal of campaigning is to win elections by changing people’s minds.
It may also help e.g. by encouraging The Base, but if it turns out that that’s the main way it’s effective then I bet there are more effective means to that goal than campaigning.
Incidentally, if anyone’s having the same nagging feeling I did—weren’t Kalla and Broockman involved somehow in some sort of scandal where someone reported on an intense-canvassing experiment like that but it was all faked, or something? -- the answer is that they were “involved” but on the right side: they helped to expose someone else’s dodgy study, at the same time as they were doing their own which so far as I know is not under any sort of suspicion.
On the face of it, the goal of campaigning is to win elections by changing people’s minds.
That doesn’t look obvious to me unless we’re talking not about the face but the facade. Campaigning is mostly about telling people what they want to hear, certainly not about informing them they will need to rearrange their prejudices [1].
From the elections point of view there are three groups of people you’re concerned with:
Your own Rabid Base. You want to energise them, provide incentives for them to be loud, active, confident, with contagious enthusiasm.
Other parties’ Rabid Bases. Flip the sign: you want to demoralise them, make them doubtful, weak, passive. You want them to sit inside and mope.
The Undecideds, aka the Great Middle through which you have to muddle. This is where most of the action is. Do you want to convince them with carefully arranged chains of logical policy arguments? Hell, no. They don’t vote on this basis. They vote on the basis of (1) Who promises more; (2) Who seems to be less likely to screw the pooch; and (3) Who exhudes more charisma/leadership—not necessarily in this order, of course. Most of this is System 1 stuff, aka the gut feeling.
Notice how pretty much none of the above involves changing people’s minds.
[1] “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices”—William James
On the face of it, the goal of campaigning is to win elections by changing people’s minds.
It may also help e.g. by encouraging The Base, but if it turns out that that’s the main way it’s effective then I bet there are more effective means to that goal than campaigning.
Incidentally, if anyone’s having the same nagging feeling I did—weren’t Kalla and Broockman involved somehow in some sort of scandal where someone reported on an intense-canvassing experiment like that but it was all faked, or something? -- the answer is that they were “involved” but on the right side: they helped to expose someone else’s dodgy study, at the same time as they were doing their own which so far as I know is not under any sort of suspicion.
That doesn’t look obvious to me unless we’re talking not about the face but the facade. Campaigning is mostly about telling people what they want to hear, certainly not about informing them they will need to rearrange their prejudices [1].
From the elections point of view there are three groups of people you’re concerned with:
Your own Rabid Base. You want to energise them, provide incentives for them to be loud, active, confident, with contagious enthusiasm.
Other parties’ Rabid Bases. Flip the sign: you want to demoralise them, make them doubtful, weak, passive. You want them to sit inside and mope.
The Undecideds, aka the Great Middle through which you have to muddle. This is where most of the action is. Do you want to convince them with carefully arranged chains of logical policy arguments? Hell, no. They don’t vote on this basis. They vote on the basis of (1) Who promises more; (2) Who seems to be less likely to screw the pooch; and (3) Who exhudes more charisma/leadership—not necessarily in this order, of course. Most of this is System 1 stuff, aka the gut feeling.
Notice how pretty much none of the above involves changing people’s minds.
[1] “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices”—William James