Thanks for the paper, and for answering questions. There are a couple of hypotheses I wonder about:<p>1) Politicians don&#x27;t care about constituent&#x27;s current opinions, but about their future response to actions the politican might undertake. For example, recent articles indicate widespread support in the U.S. for gun control, but a politician might anticipate: If I support a gun control measure then the NRA will run ads in my district; that will change many opinions [1], spread other negative stories about me, and galvanize my opponents both in public discussion and when getting voters to the polls.<p>2) The large differences between different subgroups explain the difference: All constituents, all voters, primary voters, and the few who vote in state legislative elections. (I challenge HN readers to name your state representatives without looking them up.)<p>If these issues are covered in the paper, I apologize; I read what I could now and searched the paper for related terms, but won&#x27;t have time to finish reading until much later.<p>----<p>[1] I don&#x27;t know that ads have this effect. My impression is that most people&#x27;s opinions are weakly held and that they follow the herd on most issues (whichever herd they feel they belong to).