Targeted toward libertarians, but great advice for changing public opinion, regardless of your political beliefs. @[204401235:2048:Robert Wiblin] @[15616116:2048:Robin Hanson] @[633481899:2048:Bryan Caplan] @[512282185:2048:Jason Asbahr]
"Policy advocates engaged in changing public opinion rarely pay much attention to what the academic literature says about how public opinion is formed and how and why it changes. That’s too bad, because while political scientists disagree about a lot of things, this is not one of them. Several decades of robust empirical tests offer a pretty good road map for those who want to effectively go about “waging and winning the war of ideas.
...
what we know can best be found in John Zaller’s The Nature & Origins of Mass Opinion
...
(1) Our primary audience should be political and policy elites and arguments should be crafted to appeal to them first and foremost. That’s because winning the minds of the small number of public intellectuals and political elite is sufficient to change the minds of the public at large. Elite cues decisively move even deeply-rooted partisan policy beliefs in the public at large. As elites go, so go the most politically aware, and then, eventually, so goes the rest of society...
...
(2) Our policy arguments should be empirically-based with references to ideology and philosophy minimized to the greatest extent possible. People tend to disregard arguments that are perceived to be in conflict with their underlying values and partisan and ideological group-identities.
...
(3) Winning policy converts on both sides of the Left-Right political spectrum is crucial. The only means of achieving stable public support for government policy is the creation and maintenance of elite consensus. This requires us to successfully sell our ideas to both liberal and conservative elites. Zaller demonstrates that elite consensus occurs more frequently than we might think, but it cannot occur during polarizing ideological conflict."
https://thefirstprinciple.com/blogpost/?postid=597&_ga=1.10293683.727959850.1454827940
"Policy advocates engaged in changing public opinion rarely pay much attention to what the academic literature says about how public opinion is formed and how and why it changes. That’s too bad, because while political scientists disagree about a lot of things, this is not one of them. Several decades of robust empirical tests offer a pretty good road map for those who want to effectively go about “waging and winning the war of ideas.
...
what we know can best be found in John Zaller’s The Nature & Origins of Mass Opinion
...
(1) Our primary audience should be political and policy elites and arguments should be crafted to appeal to them first and foremost. That’s because winning the minds of the small number of public intellectuals and political elite is sufficient to change the minds of the public at large. Elite cues decisively move even deeply-rooted partisan policy beliefs in the public at large. As elites go, so go the most politically aware, and then, eventually, so goes the rest of society...
...
(2) Our policy arguments should be empirically-based with references to ideology and philosophy minimized to the greatest extent possible. People tend to disregard arguments that are perceived to be in conflict with their underlying values and partisan and ideological group-identities.
...
(3) Winning policy converts on both sides of the Left-Right political spectrum is crucial. The only means of achieving stable public support for government policy is the creation and maintenance of elite consensus. This requires us to successfully sell our ideas to both liberal and conservative elites. Zaller demonstrates that elite consensus occurs more frequently than we might think, but it cannot occur during polarizing ideological conflict."
https://thefirstprinciple.com/blogpost/?postid=597&_ga=1.10293683.727959850.1454827940