I’ve been thinking a bit about Jerusalem Demsas’s reporting on what convinces poll respondents to support building more housing. I’m increasingly convinced that to convince a swing voter on an issue, and especially to convince a politician, you just have to make the issue sound as positive, obvious, and boring as possible.
Until now, my instinct has been to make arguments about why things are bad and causal claims about what would fix it. So, for housing, something like: explain the intuition for why demand curves slope downward, use some examples of policies from places with well-functioning housing markets, tell a story about how it used to be better in X place and about the policies that messed it up. This leads to a more interesting conversation for you, and especially for the person you’re talking to (who’ll really enjoy bringing up counterexamples and playing devil’s advocate). This is what you need to do to change someone’s mental model of the how the issue works. But for the same reason, the likelihood of flipping someone’s vote with this messaging is low, because it requires them to change their mental model of how the world works.
What do I think does work? Here are some examples:
We should build more homes so that more people can buy a house
We should build more homes because we live in a growing city, and people need homes
We should build more homes so that more people have a place to live
We should build more homes so that our city has more tax money
These aren’t shorthands. Those sentences are literally what I think I would say if I had to give public comment at a city council meeting today.
I think these claims work because they sound positive and associate your proposed policy with things people already consider good (homeownership, tax money, etc.). The mental effort to process the argument is so low that the other person can immediately accept it as a good idea and can jump to the bargaining step: am I willing to deal with the costs of this policy, how much of it can we do before it starts to piss people off, etc.
They’re also obvious-sounding and boring arguments, which have the advantage of appealing to broader ideological groups and not activating the cerebral, policy-debating part of people’s brains.
The goal is more to show that the idea's not bad and has reasonable UX than to prove that it's good. It's sort of like showing someone a new toy, demonstrating that it fits in their hand and is smooth around the edges and makes cool noises, rather than explaining how it works inside.
There’s an unintuitive consequence here: emphasizing how bad existing policies and outcomes are makes you less persuasive! Telling people about Howard Jarvis and your state’s multi-million home deficit is, somehow, less convincing than just saying that more people should have a place to live. The doom message might instill urgency in someone who’s already won over, but for the unconverted it just complicates the message and invites policy reasoning. It makes people question if your policy can solve this huge problem. And it makes people think about who put those current policies in place and if they can identify with them.
Finally, in a practical sense, if you’re trying to sell a policy in a one-on-one conversation, the other person is going to have a lot of pre-existing ideas and questions, and it’s more worth your time to let them talk and address their questions than to give them a long rant. Again, these questions are likely to be bargaining mode questions (where will people park), which are way easier to address than show me some econometric studies to prove that this policy actually works questions.
Convincing politicians
All of these messaging arguments are especially true when trying to convince a politician who’s on the fence. An elected’s incentives are to vote for things that are boring, sound positive to voters, and don’t piss people off. When giving public comment, you should try to convince them that everyone likes this policy, or at least everyone in their party. If they identify as a progressive or a dedicated conservative, tell them why the policy is obviously consistent with their ideology. And finally, don’t make them think that this policy is risky or bold or will have large or noticeable effects in the short term.