Shared Theories of Persuasion? How Citizens and Politicians Evaluate Political Arguments

What makes a political argument persuasive—and do citizens and politicians share similar intuitions about what works? Persuasion is central to democratic representation: politicians seek to convince citizens to support policy, while citizens aim to influence those in office. Yet we know little about whether these groups’ “theories of persuasion” align, or whether their assumptions match actual effects. We address this question through an LLM-guided paired conjoint and vignette experiment conducted in 2025 with representative citizen samples and politicians in Denmark and the UK. Respondents evaluated which of two arguments—varying in appeal type, source cues, and framing features—would be more persuasive to themselves or to the other group, before we tested these arguments’ capacity to shift policy attitudes. Preliminary results show that citizens and politicians assess appeal types in strikingly similar ways, favoring factual and moral reasoning over emotional appeals. Persuasion occurs on average, but no specific message features reliably increase it. These findings suggest encouraging overlap in how elites and citizens think about persuasion, yet highlight enduring uncertainty about when and why persuasion succeeds in democratic communication.