The Effect of Grassroots Campaigning on Issue Preferences and Issue Salience

What effect, if any, do personally delivered campaign messages have on political attitudes? Recent evidence suggests that these messages can affect voting behavior, but not issue opinions (Arceneaux 2007). We extend this work by considering the effect of electioneering on opinions about contested position issues, and whether the delivery method of the message matters. Drawing on a large scale randomized field experiment, we show that personally delivered campaign messages can influence people’s issue attitudes and issue importance on emerging issues. Furthermore, we find that people are able to resist persuasive messages that are inconsistent with their value preferences