The best way to pressure elected officials

If you want to pressure your elected officials, whether it’s the City Council or Senators in Congress, there are a variety of things you can do: sending emails, phone calls, going to a protest, and much more. But which should you pursue?

To answer that question we will cover:

• A brief thought experiment involving polka dots.
• The factors that make a difference in how communications are received.
• How you can shape your communication to maximize your impact, applying the concept of signaling from game theory.

Polka dots: aesthetic ideal or visual crime?!?

There’s a proposal to paint City Hall with polka dots, and the City Council is trying to gauge the public’s feeling about this. They get a variety of communications for and against.

Assuming they don’t personally have a strong opinion, how do they decide which opinion they should listen to?

There are a number of factors to consider:

• Number of communications: All other things being equal, more communications talking about the evils of polka dots suggests that polka dots are unpopular.
• Importance of proponents: Some people’s opinions matter more than others; I’ve discussed this in the context of City Council politics. More likely voters and volunteers, and of course richer donors, are more likely to be listened to.
• Strength of support: Different people might have different levels of conviction. Perhaps the pro-polka voters feel so strongly about the topic that they will never vote for a candidate who opposes polka dots, whereas the anti-polka dot voters don’t really care that much.

Practical implications for your communications

First, any communication is better than no communication, because it increases the number of communications.

Second, getting other people who agree with you to communicate their opinion is also valuable.

Third, you should always mention any personal characteristics that make you more politically important. For example: “As a resident of Cambridge for the past 200 years, as well as the owner of 3 mansions, 2 obelisks and a crypt in Mt Auburn Cemetery, and a small cadre of registered-to-vote minions who obey my every command, I believe polka dots are an abomination”, etc..

That leaves the strength of your conviction: how can you communicate how strongly you feel about the subject to elected officials?

Signaling strength of support with expended effort

One way you could communicate your feelings is with the content of your communication. If you write an email, you can write “this is very important!” If you make a phone call, you can talk how about how important it is to you.

The problem is, everyone communicating with elected officials has every incentive to exaggerate their support. If you hate polka dots, but not quite enough to vote against a polka dot supporter, you’re not going to say “I’ll vote for you regardless,” that would be counter-productive.

As a result, elected officials simply can’t trust your self-described level of support. So you need is some way to signal your commitment that is hard to fake.

This is where expended effort comes in. Whereas the content of your communication is very easy to change, spending more effort clearly takes more effort. If you’re investing more time, more money, more emotional energy, that sends a strong signal that you are seriously committed, even if you say the exact same thing.

And so the more visible effort a given form of communication takes, the more seriously elected officials will take your communication. Which means we can rank forms of communication from least to most impactful based on how much effort they take:

1. Sending a form letter, unchanged from its original text. This takes the least effort, and therefore has the least impact on elected officials.
2. Sending a custom-written email.
3. Making a phone call.
4. Calling in for public comment in a remote meeting.
5. Giving public comment at a meeting in person.
6. Going to a protest or rally. This takes the most effort, especially if it’s bad weather, and therefore has the most impact.

Not everyone will have the same hierarchy of effort, but the general ranking of effort is pretty consistent. And for what it’s worth, I’ve heard this same hierarchy from other people as well.

Summary

1. Any communication is better than nothing.
2. More people communicating is better than fewer people communicating.
3. The more effort a form of communication takes, the more impact it will have. Thus a phone call is likely to be far more impactful than a pre-written form letter sent via email.

And a bonus takeaway: the more local the official, the more impact every action makes, because the voter pool is smaller. A City Councilor in Cambridge is elected by as few as 2,300 people, so they will read every single email they get. As comparison, Senator Warren was elected with 2 million votes, so individual emails have a smaller impact.

This suggests that if you have very limited time or energy, you should prioritize more impactful and therefore time-consuming or energy-consuming communications for state or Federal officials, and stick to emails for city officials.

Take action

• Next time an issue you care about comes up, write a quick email to the City Council. It takes 30 seconds!
• https://5calls.org/ gives you talking points and phone #s to call state and Federal elected officials.
• Go to a protest! There are protests against the Trump administration happening multiple times a week.

A bit more

Song of the day: Polka Never Dies, by The Dreadnoughts.