How Can We Change Their Minds? A Field Experiment on the Ability of Interest Groups to Affect Public Opinion

Associations representing important diffuse interests such as consumer organizations rely heavily on their ability to mobilize and activate the public. If they fail, both their ability to influence policy, and their survival as organizations can be threatened. Still, both academics and practitioners still know too little about whether and when their campaigns actually make a difference. In order to systematically assess whether and how different types of campaign frames among interest groups affect the success of interest group campaigns, we conducted a field experiment in cooperation with an important Danish consumer organization. Different versions of their new and unpublished campaign material were sent to a representative sample of 5000 Danish citizens. The design allowed us to convey the same new message through different cues (emotional, factual and opinion-based), and compare this to treating citizens with material on an unrelated issue. Based on this data, we test whether and when the interest group can affect their positions, perceived salience and intended consumer behavior on the concrete campaign issue. Our study adds significantly to existing scholarship by presenting a strong causal design for estimating potential effects of different types of advocacy communication on citizens.