Research question: Persuasion is key to politics, particularly in new democracies where elites constantly convince their citizens to go along with difficult policies. Because citizens in new democracies do not have a longstanding partisanship cue, they must make political judgments based on other kinds of information, such as that from elite messages. How persuadable are citizens who are new to democracy? More provocatively, are citizens of some new democracies more persuadable than others? This paper examines these questions using the cases of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Despite sharing a political history as one country, Czechoslovakia, for a half-century, similar political institutions, and similar transitions from communism, support for salient political policies in both countries differs dramatically. In the case of support for EU membership, Slovaks have consistently exhibited strong levels of support, while Czechs are far more ambivalent. What role have elite messages played in getting citizens to either support or reject membership – do elite messages play any role at all, or are citizens’ preferences completely exogenous to support for political policies? These cases provide a unique laboratory in which to examine aggregate-level differences in persuadability, as well as to discover the individual-level causal mechanism. Extant literature on attitude change tells us that persuasion depends on the characteristics of both the message itself and the recipient of that message. Arguments about EU membership share several traits, three of which include direction (whether the argument is for or against integration), strength (whether the argument gives a few strong reasons or none at all), and source (whether the argument is presented by an expert or a non-expert source). A key characteristic of message recipients that affects persuadability is motivation to care about the issue of EU membership. My purpose is four-fold: first, to establish whether persuasion is likely to occur at all; second, to determine whether different types of people in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia are more persuadable than others; third, to investigate whether different types of arguments are more persuasive than others; and fourth, to uncover whether there are any aggregate-level differences in the persuadability of citizens in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Methods: I employ a random, representative survey experiment of 501 Czech citizens and 500 Slovak citizens conducted in July 2002 and May 2003. Opinion change is analyzed using ordinary least squares regression. Hypotheses and anticipated results: Opinion change does occur. At the level of the recipient, the most motivated individuals will be the least likely to be persuaded by any argument. Control variables, including level of education, gender, and urban/rural place of residence, will be insignificant. Czechs are less likely to be persuaded than Slovaks. At the level of the message, a strong argument is more persuasive than a weak argument, but this is mediated by whether the source of the argument is an expert or not. The direction of the argument will be insignificant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]