This paper explores the effect of anecdotes on political elites. It shows that anecdotes (or episodic information) have a substantially stronger effect than that of statistical information in several outcomes
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.
Empirical work on policy diffusion has established that policymakers are more likely to learn from the experiences of neighbors. Yet, the underlying mechanism behind spatially clustered policy learning remains unclear. We adjudicate between mechanisms using data from two field experiments.