This report was written by Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. It has been adapted from the originally published version.

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Many societies that feature democratic forms of governance on the surface suffer from a variety of ills that can chip away at citizens’ trust in their current form of government. Corruption, crime and bribery plague much of the developing world. But precisely which factors are essential to the growth and continued prosperity of democratic institutions is a longstanding debate in the social sciences.

The Internet is thick with social networks, but it is not clear which conditions favor the rapid spread of information or the adoption of behaviors offline. One theory maintains that an online network with more “weak ties” and overall connections can quickly and efficiently encourage the adoption of a given social behavior. A competing theory suggests that a network with more clusters of overlapping connections can better promote that behavior by delivering the same message to an individual multiple times.

Scholars from Northwestern University set out to study an underappreciated aspect of public opinion and communications: how the sequence and timing of messages from electoral and policy campaigns can shape views over longer intervals of time. Typically, as the scholars point out, experimental research has focused on the short-term effects of a given message on the public and has found that two competing, simultaneous messages can cancel one another out.

An individual’s capacity to learn is often treated as static across his or her lifetime.  Studies that identify changes in IQ (a widely used, standardized measure of intellectual abilities) are generally unable to attribute that change to a real increase or decrease in intelligence as opposed to measurement error in testing, and much of the variation in IQ remains unexplained.