How Do Politicians Respond to Misinformed Constituents? Experimental Evidence from U.S. State Legislators

Many citizens hold misperceptions about political facts. While a large amount of literature examines how these misperceptions affect citizens’ opinions, much less attention has been paid to how politicians perceive and communicate with their misinformed constituents. In this talk, I present results from a survey experiment on state legislative offices that manipulated the factual content of a sample constituent e-mail. I find that, compared to a control e-mail with no factual content, misinformed and informed constituents are viewed as less persuadable, while uninformed constituents are viewed as more persuadable. Most notably, participants report less willingness to respond to e-mails from misinformed constituents and greater willingness to respond to e-mails from uninformed constituents (relative to control). However, conditional on responding, elites are willing to provide factual information to both groups. Thus, although politicians are willing to provide information to their uninformed and misinformed constituents, the misinformed—who presumably need information the most—are much less likely to receive it.