Unreliable yet influential? Political Elites and Interest Groups as Source Cues

The persuasion models of influence on the political decision-making process suggest that interest groups provide information to convince politicians to change or maintain their positions on a policy. In this paper, I argue that to correctly assess the models’ claim, we have to understand how politicians perceive interest groups as information sources and whether their perceived credibility affects how persuasive they are.

Cruz, Daniel (2026) - Working Paper