#109: The Realities of Political Persuasion with David Broockman

06 Oct 2025 • 53 min • EN
53 min
00:00
53:16
No file found

David Broockman is a political scientist at UC Berkeley who digs into one of democracy’s core questions: can political messages really change minds? He’s spent his career running careful studies of persuasion, from door-to-door conversations to the effects of cable news, and testing whether the confident claims of political consultants actually hold up. In our conversation, David shares the path that brought him into political science and the “credibility revolution” that reshaped how researchers study politics. We talk about what persuasion looks like in practice, why it’s so hard to predict which messages will work, and what his research reveals about the gap between political insiders’ instincts and what actually moves the needle. Source for intro to government shutdowns:Politicians argue both sides of government shutdown | AP NewsA Brief History of U.S. Government ShutdownsThat Time a Lawyer Invented the Government Shutdown - Government Executive For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode"s page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/ Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

From "Opinion Science"

Listen on your iPhone

Download our iOS app and listen to interviews anywhere. Enjoy all of the listener functions in one slick package. Why not give it a try?

App Store Logo
application screenshot

Popular categories