‘Press 1 for Roads’: Improving Political Communication with New Technology

Authors: Miriam Golden, Saad Gulzar, and Luke Sonnet

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Abstract

Politicians face chronic problems collecting accurate information from voters about their policy preferences, a problem especially severe where interactions occur through face-to-face meetings that are potentially dominated by an unrepresentative subgroup of voters. We supplement existing interactions by experimentally providing Interactive Voice Response technology to Pakistani politicians, allowing them to script and record questions for voters and allowing voters to respond on cell phones. The new technology changes the initiator, scope, content, scale, personalism, and frequency of two-way political communication. Our results present mixed evidence on the efficacy of improving political communication when instigated by politicians: even though politicians and voters both exhibit eagerness to engage in this shift, politicians do not follow through with changes in policy-relevant behavior and voters’ downstream political attitudes and behavior remain unaltered. We discuss why this might be, emphasizing that face-to-face interactions are not always unrepresentative of voters or inadequate in collecting their preferences.