Field experiment evidence of substantive, attributional, and behavioral persuasion by members of Congress in online town halls

Significance Persuasion is at the core of leadership, especially in a democracy, yet there is remarkably little evidence that direct appeals from leaders causally affect the attitudes and behaviors of their followers. The available evidence is either observational and indirect or based on laboratory experiments that simulate selected features of interactions with leaders. We fill this void with two randomized controlled field experiments in...