Constituent Communication Through Telephone Town Halls: A Field Experiment Involving Members of Congress

Abstract

Telephone town halls are an increasingly prevalent method for members of Congress (MCs) to communicate with constituents, even while garnering popular criticism for failing to facilitate engagement and accountability. Yet scholars have paid little attention to the events and their effects, and even less to how they might be improved. To remedy this problem, we report on a field experiment in which four MCs joined their constituents in telephone town halls. Overall, participation in an event improved constituents’ evaluations of the format in general, and of the MC in particular. Furthermore, we studied how these events might be improved by evaluating a reform—a single‐topic focus with predistributed briefing materials—designed to enhance deliberative interaction. This reform enhanced effects on opinions of the format without significantly altering effects on attitudes toward the MC. Our results suggest that telephone town halls hold promise for constituents, officeholders, and democratic practice.

Making the Case for Democracy

“…This does not mean that political actors should abandon issue-based persuasion as a goal, but that they should engage in democratic persuasion alongside it. We also show that town halls are not only important places of exchange, representation and persuasion (Abernathy et al 2019;Minozzi et al 2015), but potentially also crucial fora where democratic attitudes can be reinforced and doubts about the system of government can be addressed.…”

“…Besides the established work on democracy promotion from Global South contexts, we draw on related bodies of literature to devise persuasive strategies that politicians could employ during encounters with ordinary citizens. We know that personal encounters between politicians and citizens can be an eective way of shaping citizens' attitudes (Cantoni and Pons 2021;Foos and John 2018;Wantchekon 2017) and that town halls have been used as popular fora where politicians can directly communicate with a relatively large number of citizens (Abernathy et al 2019;Wantchekon 2017;López-Moctezuma et al 2020;Minozzi et al 2015).…”

Mixed Methods

“…However, in the case of deliberative democracy, the relationship between theory and empirical research is rather atypical because deliberative theory is a normative characterization of ideal states of affairs. While normative theories cannot be tested as such, they involve empirical claims that can be tested, and this is what experiments on deliberative democracy seek to achieve (Setälä and Herne 2014).…”

“…First, holding deliberations on issues that are less salient makes it less plausible that external events change people's attitudes, and thus more plausible that the deliberative event causes any observed changes. Second, surveying participants closely before and after the deliberative event lessens the likelihood that observed changes are due to external events (Abernathy et al 2019).…”

Are Individuals Harmed by Gerrymandering? Examining Access to Congressional District Offices

“…Members of Congress go to great effort to connect with constituents through solicited and unsolicited official outreach (Cover, 1980; Cover and Brumberg, 1982). Even as the once ubiquitous printed congressional newsletter has given way to electronic forms of communication, Cormack (2016) finds members still using the resources of their office to build connections with their constituents and position themselves in politically attractive terms (see also Abernathy et al., 2019, on the value of tele‐town halls).…”