Inoculation Theory

In the early 1960, William McGuire began to build the theory of inoculation in and around communication and persuasion.

The theory has since been studied extensively with nuances offered (a large debt to Michael Pfau).

The communication theory uses a metaphor from biology that is especially relevant with COVID as the topic of the day. 

A person or entity can expose individuals to a weakened argument (line of attack) and by doing so can “inoculate” the individuals exposed to future, potentially more robust attacks.

The theory is not without detractors, and some researchers have dismissed the theory all together.

However, research continues and the field, like all social science, continues to develop.

In the political context, we often come across the theory when dealing with negative information we have found out about our own client and are wrestling with how to deal with a potential line(s) of attack.

A Brief Note About Negative Campaigning

It works.

A Brief Note About Opposition Research

It will be found.

Inoculation in a Political Context

We have established that negative campaigning works and that a good opposition research investigation will uncover your deep secrets.  If they aren’t uncovered by a researcher, your secrets will be likely hand-delivered by a jilted ex or an upset past acquaintance that does not share your politics.  (Trust me on all of this).

We have learned from experience, you must “hang a lantern” on your issues and by doing so inoculate yourself.

Inoculation in Politics

The theory works like this, I hang a lantern on my problem and I attack my own campaign.  In this case, I am open about my problem, but most importantly I tell you!

Critical to this is the individual must perceive a threat.

How do we do this?

“My opponent is going to attack me (or our campaign, our movement) by saying…..”

I then work to pre-empt their argument or refute it.  I simply give the audience the ammunition to refute and / or build additional refutations.

By doing so I am weakening the “shock” and the effectiveness, but more importantly I am inviting you to generate counter arguments or I am providing you the counter arguments.

This is extremely effective when the attack is likely to come from the other party in the hyper-polarized times.  Why?  The threat appears greater and often the audience is then more motivated to generate counter arguments.

Research On Inoculation

I am going to point you to two studies.

The first is one of my go to research tactics – look for a meta study on your topic.  Meta-studies are fantastic – they are a review and summation of available research on a topic.  If you can find a good, recent one, you’ll save a lot of time AND have a fantastic reference sheet for further study.

In this case, we have a meta-analysis done by Banas & Rains in 2010.  It offers a much better in-depth coverage of the nuance in the field than I can offer in this post.

It concludes while there is counter-findings in the field, a review of the available research finds “inoculation treatments are more effective than no-treatment controls or supportive treatments in fostering resistance to attitude change. “

The second study is an older study (1990), but I include it because it is specific towards campaigns.

Michael Pfau, et al look at inoculations via direct mail in the 1988 presidential campaign. Dukakis v GH Bush. In my kind of experiment (and to be fair), the researchers attacked both candidates. The Bush messages attacked Dukakis for being weak on crime, and the Dukakis messages attacked Bush for support of agriculture policies and policies that hurt rural America. (A criticism is these lines of attack appear almost cute or quaint in the current times, but that is an issue for another day.  Another criticism is the study is a relative low sample study and likely due for a replication study using a larger sample.)

In short, they find inoculation to outperform post-hoc refutation – and the experiment was conducted via direct mail. This finding was robust among strong party identifiers.

Conclusion

We have previously explored the hyper-partisanship and polarization that exists in America.

A past client of mine disagreed with my bleak assessment and said reform is “easy” – just make all races non-partisan and THEN the campaigns will be about character and not politics. 

I am known for my candor, and how that has gotten me into trouble in the past.  I have been making an effort – a true effort – in selecting my words more carefully.  Instead of saying “You could not be more wrong!” I found myself saying “Well, let’s see if we can find any research that agrees with your position….” 

 We are fully aware that party identification is the leading factor in voting – said another way – “Republicans tend to vote for Republicans and Democrats tend to vote for Democrats”.

In voting behavior, most don’t need to know details other than party to vote the “right way”.  If we both identify as a member of the same party, we are very likely to share values and I don’t need to know much more than the party of a candidate in a general election to “vote correctly.”

So, the conventional wisdom – if we REMOVE the party especially from the ballot by making all elections non-partisan, it will force candidates and voters to go deeper.  The short cut is removed…..so simple, right?

Not so fast my friend!  Chris W. Bonneau, University of Pittsburg, and Damon M. Cann of Utah State explored the non-partisan elections of judicial candidates.

I believe this is a brilliant way to approach this subject.  The state bar associations take many extra steps in a futile attempt to remove “politics” from a political process.  In addition, judicial elections are … lower intensity races (said another way – kinda boring) with lower spending and lower voter engagement.

PERFECT for exploring the strength of party ID on nonpartisan races.

In short, what they found is there is no shortage of cues or shortcuts available to interject partisanship into a campaign.  In fact “voters are able to identify the partisan identification of candidates from ideological and issue based cues even when candidates’ explicit partisanship is omitted from the ballot.”

In fact, the results show it is kinda easy.

In a sense, they conclude “nonpartisan elections ineffective at removing the partisan element from elections.”

We observe the exact same thing in municipal races we have worked in and or polled.  Whether it is the local party interjecting to activate party ID or outside groups endorsing to activate party ID – there are NO shortages of signals and for the most part – the numbers don’t lie.

CONCLUSION

Sorry to be the popper of bubbles – but the proposed reform of nonpartisan elections being a solution is not backed by research.  In fact it is explicitly dis-proven. 

Sadly, in America, for the most part there is no such thing as a nonpartisan election – especially if one party has an incentive to interject partisan cues.

I once met an attorney who was at the top of her field.  I mean she is a cracker-jack attorney with a crazy intellect and extremely well respected in the legal field. 

I asked her how she became such a great attorney.  Her answer was simple, “When I was in law school, I read every footnote.”

In today’s Science Friday, we have a case where the supplemental information is as interesting, if not more interesting than the study itself. 

Today’s study: “Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion”  Authored by scholars from Columbia, Stanford, Wharton, and Cambridge. 

It is an interesting study that explored effects when ads are matched to one of the big 5 personality traits, the OCEAN MODEL. 

Study Findings

In research that will stun no one, the authors find”people’s psychological
characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets.”

This is the part the drives me nuts – of course this makes sense.  If you tell me what you like, I can then predict things, and I can tailor my messaging….but HOW does one do it?

The authors go on to write “that matching the content of persuasive appeals to individuals’ psychological characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases. Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to experience level resulted in up to 40% more clicks and up to 50% more purchases than their mismatching or unpersonalized counterparts.“

Cool, right?  That is a pretty big lift.
But the real cool stuff is in the supplemental.

How to match Likes to Personality

The supplemental demonstrates HOW they matched advertising to personality types.  That’s the magic.

And it all started with one of those stupid personality tests on facebook.

So, there you have it…easy peasy….except for the organization that was conducting the personality tests stopped making the data available to researchers.

But could one reverse engineer what the researchers did?   I think so….

CLICK HERE TO TAKE YOUR FREE PERSONALITY TEST (Just kidding)

Conclusion

If you believe the press, Republicans are fleeing the party by the thousands – especially after the Jan 6 incident at the capitol.

Well, we don’t believe the press at face value, and we prefer to compile our own data and make our own conclusions.

In the past, we have explored the tremendous amount of churn in Florida’s voters file. 

However, in this case the research question is “In Florida, are Republicans leaving the party?  Follow up:  How does that rate compare to Democrats leaving their party?  Is there an uptick in Replicans leaving the party?”

Methodology

I found some old voter-files in a desk drawer.

file 1 – Florida Voter-file December 2017

file 2 – Florida Voter-file December 2020

file 3 – Florida Voter-file – February 2021

Exploration 1: December 2017 –> February 2021.

Exploration 2: December 2020 –> February 2021.

I loaded each voter file in its entirety.  Then I joined each by the state’s voter ID number.  I dropped any observations that were not on both rolls.  Then I simply looked at the party registration in the first file, looked at the party registration in the second file and if they differ deemed them a “switch”.

Florida Voters December 2017 vs Florida Voters February 2021

In this graph, on the right hand side is Dec 2017 and on the right hand side is the switch.  This graph allows us to see how the switches flowed.  (click the graph for a larger view.)

But this shows us that in that time, 271,431 (22% of total switches) Republicans switched their registration compared to 387,005 (31% of total) Democrats, and 557,092 (45% of total) NPAs.

So in this time period, MORE Democrats in Florida fled their party.

R Detail

In this Rep detail, 46% of the switches moved from Rep to Dem, 44% of the switches moved to from Rep to NPA, and 11% moved to Other.

Dem Detail

In this Dem detail, 53% of the switches moved from Dem to Rep, 40% of the switches moved to from Dem to NPA, and 6% moved to Other.

NPA Detail

In this case, 52% of the switches moved from NPA to Dem, 40% of the switches moved to from NPA to Rep, and 8% moved to Other.

Florida Voters December 2020 vs Florida Voters February 2021

In this case we redo the counting, but comparing Dec 2020 to Feb 2021.

In this graph, on the right hand side is Dec 2020 and on the right hand side is the switch.  This graph allows us to see how the switches flowed.  (click the graph for a larger view.)

This shows us that in that time, 39,815 (60% of total switches) Republicans switched their registration compared to 12,933 (20% of total) Democrats, and 1,718 (3% of total) NPAs.

So, we observe a dramatic increase in the proportion of switches – Republicans are moving in greater numbers than they have in the past two years.

R Detail

In this case, 59% of the switches moved from Rep to NPA, 23% of the switches moved to from Rep to Other, and 17% moved to Dem.

Dem Detail

In this case, 57% of the switches moved from Dem to NPA, 31% of the switches moved to from Dem to NPA, and 12% moved to Other.

NPA Detail

In this case, 42% of the switches moved from NPA to Rep, 40% of the switches moved to from NPA to Dem, and 18% moved to Other.

Plot twist

In an interesting plot twist and going against the conventional wisdom that the GOP is bleeding ‘suburban women’, 51% of Republican party switchers are male.  Of the Democrat switchers 56% of them are female.

CONCLUSION

In the larger context, in the past two years, the Democrat party lost 387,005 voters to other parties while the Republican party lost 271,431 voters to other parties.   This is compared to 557,092 NPAs that registered with a different party – 52% of them registering as Dems and 40% of them registering as Rep.

REMINDER: this analysis is not looking at new registrations or removals (death).

However, the data doesn’t lie and there is a red flashing light:

In the past 2 years, 22% of the voters switching parties were Republicans.

In the past 2 months, 60% of the voters switching parties were Republicans.

The rate of Republicans switching parties has definitely increased in comparison to a base line and it is something to watch very closely moving forward.