My experience of being on the other end of this is quite old (2001-2002) but I doubt the fundamental dynamics have changed.
There are some things for which your representative absolutely has a fixed vote, either because they personally have a strong view or because political constraints (district demographics, internal party pressure, whatever) are significant. For other things, they will likely pattern match against their broad inclinations (for free trade, anti taxes, for green energy, whatever) at least as an initial position. For many issues, though, your representative probably doesn't care much at all, by default.
But the ways things move from the second or third boxes to the first are pressure (enough voters/co-partisans/whoever caring makes inaction politically expensive), money (election campaigns cost cash and so cash buys attention if not actual votes on legislation), or convincement.
If enough people write on some esoteric subject someone in the rep's office will notice, because tracking political issues is part of their job. Staffers help shape reps' policy positions and voting behaviour, at least in part because reps are too busy to pay attention to everything that comes up. And if the campaign is big and noisy enough that it threatens to become a major electoral issue then that will also force a decision one way or another. So it is possible to influence positions and behaviour, but not on every issue and very likely not if you're doing it alone (and don't write large cheques).
You'll definitely get a form letter for anything they have a form letter for, though. And even without then the actual letter is likely written by an intern or junior staffer (or I guess GAI these days). But then when I was reading incoming mail most of that was form letters and pre-printed campaign postcards too, so it was difficult to feel too regretful that the replies were mostly mass-produced rather than artisanal.
On your recommendation, I have just (fairly quickly) read the paper. I'm not impressed. It appears to assume that "some philosophers and scientists" have objections to race-based intelligence classifications based upon a belief that environmental factors alone are responsible for individual variation - then argues that this is false.
The reason why I object to group-based arguments about intelligence is specifically because the intra-group differences are bigger than the inter-group differences (though I also agree with some - though not all - of the critique made by the addendum/critique/reply linked under the abstract).
"Men are taller than women" is sometimes used to teach introductory ANOVA, sometimes to argue for a diversity of crash test dummies, but also to argue at "women" are less good for something because "they" are shorter. The first is trivial. The second would mostly be better dealt with by dealing with the broad range of human heights (5th/95th percentiles?) rather than merely adding an "average woman" to the existing average man one. The third is bogus because When many men are shortarses and many women are taller than me. So we're again generally better measuring people's actual height for things where it matters. Whichever group differences in intelligence are found, you're going to end up with overlapping distributions, making the groups a crappy proxy for individual variation in any case. But that's exactly what the author advocates doing in their section 4.
If you want to establish which genes are linked to intelligence then go ahead. It's not particularly important or glamorous work as far as I can see, but whatever - the academy has always had plenty of heterodox interests in it. But people jumping from nucleotide polymorphisms to grand social policy (that just happens to echo a century's worth of rightly-discredited eugenics advocacy) deserve the scepticism they get in my view.
When you wrote this sentence, were you referring to Cofnas?
"But people jumping from nucleotide polymorphisms to grand social policy (that just happens to echo a century's worth of rightly-discredited eugenics advocacy) deserve the scepticism they get in my view."
If so, what is the 'grand social policy' that Cofnas advocates or has advocated?
As far as I can tell from the paper, the only thign that seems like a policy proposal is that educational programs should be tailored to different ability profiles (and what he said about Head Start). But him saying that maybe we should fund different educational interventions isn't eugenics, or abouyt treating individuals differently depending on their race/ancestry. The paper argues against using group differences to blame or rank anyone. (See section 5.2 as it's the main point there.)
The overlapping-distributions point makes sense: even if group differences turned out to be partly genetic, group mean/median IQ or whatever isn't a good proxy for individuals from that group. So if you have a policy that is based on group membership (not individual assessment), it's going to be poorly targeted and end up wasting resources.
Section 4 endorses 'tailored' programs and doesn't explain how they'll be targeted. He doesn't say they'd be targeted by group membership, though. He references Jensen 1969 (https://gwern.net/doc/iq/1969-jensen.pdf) and in that paper Jensen advocated individual testing, not assignment based on race/ancestry. From page 78:
The important distinction between the individual and the population must always be kept clearly in mind in any discussion of racial differences in mental abilities or any other behavioral characteristics. Whenever we select a person for some special educational purpose, whether for special instruction in a grade-school class for children with learning problems, or for a "gifted" class with an advanced curriculum, or for college attendance, or for admission to graduate training or a professional school, we are selecting an individual, and we are selecting him and dealing with him as an individual for reasons of his individuality.
The important variable is the staff/student ratio, not the size of the country. With few students per class, or many teachers, this scales fine. I'm running similar exams for my (UK) Masters modules, but colleagues are reluctant to do it for the enormous compulsory survey courses as there are several hundred students in them (vs up to about 50 in the MA ones).
For a large compulsory survey course, a well written multiple choice test should suffice. If the test is well constructed, teaching to the test should cover exactly the required material and be no impediment.
There are some things for which your representative absolutely has a fixed vote, either because they personally have a strong view or because political constraints (district demographics, internal party pressure, whatever) are significant. For other things, they will likely pattern match against their broad inclinations (for free trade, anti taxes, for green energy, whatever) at least as an initial position. For many issues, though, your representative probably doesn't care much at all, by default.
But the ways things move from the second or third boxes to the first are pressure (enough voters/co-partisans/whoever caring makes inaction politically expensive), money (election campaigns cost cash and so cash buys attention if not actual votes on legislation), or convincement.
If enough people write on some esoteric subject someone in the rep's office will notice, because tracking political issues is part of their job. Staffers help shape reps' policy positions and voting behaviour, at least in part because reps are too busy to pay attention to everything that comes up. And if the campaign is big and noisy enough that it threatens to become a major electoral issue then that will also force a decision one way or another. So it is possible to influence positions and behaviour, but not on every issue and very likely not if you're doing it alone (and don't write large cheques).
You'll definitely get a form letter for anything they have a form letter for, though. And even without then the actual letter is likely written by an intern or junior staffer (or I guess GAI these days). But then when I was reading incoming mail most of that was form letters and pre-printed campaign postcards too, so it was difficult to feel too regretful that the replies were mostly mass-produced rather than artisanal.