Science Friday: Who Enters Politics and Why?

Science Friday: Who Enters Politics and Why?

Most interesting research questions begin with a real life problem.

A general political consultant we work with wanted to target digital ads to ‘people who are thinking about running for office.’  This is what we do – we build data driven audiences for people to connect with using various media.

So the question is “What type of insane people run for political office and why?” If we could better answer this question, we could build a rock solid digital media audience to target for this political consultant.

While we do not yet have the ability to read people’s minds as to their political ambition, we start by asking who has done research in this area. At times, the world aligns and you find a good paper that has done just that – reviewed the literature for you.

 

citation: Gulzar, Saad. (2021). Who Enters Politics and Why?. Annual Review of Political Science. 24. 10.1146/annurev-polisci-051418-051214.

 

Dr. Gulzar, from Stanford, does a review of the literature – using comparative data and US data.

This paper presents the difficulty of such a “simple question.”

“Who runs for office and why?” is difficult to even conceptualize and attempting to delve into the ‘whys’ illustrates how completely messy human behavior is.

In addition, this paper doesn’t begin to delve into potential difference between candidates in the hyper-polarized parties and voters in the US.

At Ozean, when we begin an analysis for a potential political candidate there are three main areas we look at: political, environment and then and only then do we look specifically at the candidate.

 

  1. What are the political considerations?  This is where we take a look at the rules, the political calendar, the district or political boundaries,  the historical returns, the political media environment.  Items that are constant over time in this district, state.
  2. What is the current political enviroment?  This is where we look at district composition, incumbency, current polling information, the national political enviroment, where the party is in recruitment process, what additional items are on the same ballot, who else may be in the race from the same party, who else may be in the race from the competiting party, and potential shifts from considerations observed in first phase.  (example – is there a pending change in political boundaries?)
  3. Candidate Traits.  This is the difficult one because depending on 1 and / or 2, specific candidate traits may be irrelevant.  As the old saying goes, the district may pick the representative.  However, assuming 1 & 2 are favorable, what traits make a successful candidate?  Because we have seen in close election after close election, candidates do matter. 

 

But even that progression shows the difficulty in reviewing this literature.  My conceptualization above is more in line with asking “What makes a successful candidate?” not “Who runs for office?”  Two very different questions. 

The research does a good job of exploring the challenge of “unseen candidates”.  These are the candidates that seriously consider a run and don’t declare for whatever reason.

The research attempts to classify three determinants – individual, group, and institutional.

On the individual front, Black is quoted as saying an individual will consider the probability of winning * the benefit of winning – Cost.  Is that net benefit higher than other options?  Like any models this is very simplistic, and I think assumes way too much rationality in the decision making process.  The model completly ignores some of the most important individual traits – the least of them being EGO.

In addition, the author explores the insitutional factors – primarily party recruitment and allocation and steering of resources.

Another group or instutional factors is one that I despise, but it is a reality – dynastic political families –name ID and political networks mean a lot in this game, and much to my chagrin, kids are able to plug into or grew up in these networks. 

Finally, a final instutional factor is the rules.  Filing fees, timeframes, Hatch Act considerations…etc.  The rules of the game – especially when it comes to ballot access – matter a lot in politics.

The author then explores political competency and asks is there a trade off between political competency and political representation.  Said another way, should the elite (weathy, highly educated (so many lawyers), leadership skills) rule us?  Should they rule us when they are significantly different than the district’s citizens?  It is an interesting section, but doesn’t really bring us closer to answering the pivotal question – “Who Runs for Office?”

Well, in this review of the literature – the author admits in the last paragraph – we really don’t have good data on this. 

 

“While researchers often focus on work on political entry or leadership that has a formal political flavor, more work is needed on the antecedents of political entry. What activities and jobs increase the likelihood of future participation in politics as a politician? Tracing the pipeline of political entry before it formally occurs could provide insights into how the political class may be broadened, for instance.”

 

CONCLUSION

While the review of the literature is informative and an relatively easy read, it does shed a light on that fact that we don’t really have great data on who runs for office.

I think some of the more interesting work mentioned in the paper is a new line of research being inspired by Dal Bó et al.  They explored Sweden, but they are attempting to look at individual variables, and I think that has promise.  If you have been in this business, you know there is a ‘type.’ and I would like to see more work done defining the individual traits of those that raise their hand and offer themselves for public service.

The Changing Landscape of Political Digital Media

 Year after year, digital media continues to make up larger shares of campaign budgets. This means new technology, new regulations, and a rapidly changing landscape. Compared to new, highly efficient methods, the “old digital” of yesterday is obsolete and in some cases – such as with political ads on Facebook – non-existent. Success in the digital sphere is reliant on how quickly you can adapt to, and take advantage of, these changes.

Banning Political Ads

The biggest hurdle for political digital media are social media regulations and bans on political ads. Within 12 months, Facebook went from dominating the political digital ad industry (almost 60% of all political digital ad spending went through Facebook in 2019-2020) to completely banning all political advertising – with few exceptions. https://www.emarketer.com/chart/233589/us-digital-political-ad-revenue-share-by-company-20192020-of-total-digital-political-ad-spending

 Many organization, political committee, and campaign digital strategies relied heavily or solely on Facebook. When the ban was put in place, they went dark and couldn’t compete.

 Bottomline – it is malpractice to put all your eggs in one basket and be at the mercy of any single platform. Successful campaigns have the ability to digitally contact audiences through multiple avenues. 

 

The New Kid on the Block – CTV and OTT

 Another major contributor to the changing digital landscape is Connected TV (CTV) and Over-the-Top (OTT) advertising. The impact of CTV/OTT is so significant that it allows digital advertising to compete with traditional TV advertising. Roughly 25% of U.S. households are unreachable using traditional TV ads after “cutting the cord” and choosing streaming services over traditional cable – up from just 19% in 2019. By 2024, this number is expected to grow to 35%. https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/21/pandemic-accelerated-cord-cutting-making-2020-the-worst-ever-year-for-pay-tv/

 CTV and OTT advertising is a highly accurate, highly efficient way to stream political ads into the living rooms of your target audience. Instead of blanketing an entire DMA with a traditional TV ad, CTV/OTT allows you to choose which households your ads are served to – cutting down waste and maximizing the use of every penny. Although it is unlikely that CTV/OTT will replace traditional TV ads in the near future, it is making a huge splash in the digital world. 

 

 

 

Science Friday: Political Direct Mail, Door Knocking, and Voter Turnout

Political Direct Mail, Door Knocking, and Voter Turnout

People often wonder whether campaign tactics actually get people to the polls… or is it a bunch of useless political hackery? Does mail actually work? What about door-knocking and those never-ending political phone calls?

In what is often regarded as the “gold standard” experiment in campaign effects and turnout, Gerber and Green (2000) tested this question in their study titled, The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment.

Find the article here.

The experiment took place during the 1998 election in New Haven, Connecticut, and involved over 30,000 registered voters. The authors contacted voters with voter-mobilization-themed messaging via direct mail, face-to-face canvassing, and telephone calls. The canvassing experiment began four weeks before the election, the direct mail experiment began 15 days before the election, and the telephone experiment began 3 days before the election.

The results showed that personal canvassing was the most effective campaign tactic for turning out voters, followed by direct mail. Phone calls had a negligible effect. Empirically, canvassing increased turnout by roughly 9.8% and direct mail increased turnout by .6% per mail piece.

How does this affect real-world campaigns? Knock on doors and send mail. One of the most important resources a candidate has is time. With such positive turnout outcomes from canvassing – candidates should spend their time knocking on doors and, of course, fundraising.

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A Research Study: Unsuccessful Political Candidates

Thank you for your interest in the original research study.  This research is conducted with our non-partisan research partner Meer Research, and the research explores the opinions of candidates that were NOT successful in running for elected office. These are people that have been in the arena and their experiences are worthy of consideration.

In addition, 2/3 of the candidates studied tell us they are likely to run again – this time with lessons learned.

We consider this to be exploratory research, and we are especially interested in your feedback and suggested additional veins of research.

After completion of the form below, you will receive an email with a link to download the form and an email to send your feedback and suggestions.

Thank you. 

DOWNLOAD THE RESEARCH STUDY:UNSUCCESSFUL CANDIDATES
Science Friday: Who Enters Politics and Why?

Science Friday: Motives for Political Reasoning

There are some studies in political science that are interesting, and the results also pique your interest into further research.

One the fundamental questions we deal with in the political consulting profession – how do people make the political decisions they make?  Frankly, we want to understand how so that we can possibly interject into the process to persuade.

We have a significant amount of research into motivating reasoning – that is the human minds incredible ability to start with an end goal and then selectively allow in information that boosts that goal while ignoring information that doesn’t.  This study sets out to explore the “motives that underline the wants.”

What makes us want what we want?

The authors are from Northwestern University and the study is found in Political Psychology (2020) entitled “When and How Different Motives Can Drive Motivated Political Reasoning”

Cite:  Bayes, R., Druckman, J. N., Goods, A., & Molden, D. C. (2020). When and How Different Motives Can Drive Motivated Political Reasoning. Political Psychology, 5, 1031. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12663

We see once again Republicans being experimented on due to their views on climate change.  We first read about this treatment with “The Influence of Identity Salience on Framing Effectiveness: An Experiment.”   Researchers tend to use highly polarized and politically charged issues in these explorations because there is a lot of motivated reasoning observed.

In this experiment, researchers look for the why?  Are Republicans trying to be accurate, affirm their moral values, or affirming their group identity, or some other reason?

The authors look at types of effective political messages:  presentation of novel information, the evocation of personally important values, and the communications of ingroup norms (um a really fancy way of saying … peer pressure).

This research specifically is attempting to explore the relative effectiveness of each message type on changing people’s opinions or under what conditions each of these types of information may be more or less effective.

The formal hypothesis is:

H1: All else constant, when an individual’s goal—affirm values, maintain a group identity, or achieve accuracy—aligns with the message provided—a moral relevance frame, group norms, or credible information—the message will have a greater effect on that individual’s opinions and intentions, relative to when the goal and the message provided do not align.

 

NOTE:  The paper also explores backlash effects (when information makes people dig into positions even more extremely), but that is an additional write up.

 

METHODS (HOW THEY DID THIS)

The authors used a large online survey of self-identified Republicans.  A total sample of 1964 was used.   Participants completed demos, and then were assigned to 1 of 13 experimental conditions.  One was a control the other 12 varied two factors:  messages and motivations.

Messages:

1)      Accuracy – a detailed informational message that describes a recent report (Volume II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment) on the scientific consensus that climate is changing due to human activities, it will have grave consequences, and individual actions are needed;

2)      Morals – “climate change is occurring and will destroy the sanctity of the pristine environment, making it everyone’s patriotic duty to take action to combat climate change.”

3)      Ingroup – “the climate is changing, that contrary to many people’s impressions a clear majority of Republicans agree with this fact, and also that many Republicans are taking action to combat climate change.”

Independent of the messages, four motivations were explored:

1)      No-motivation (ideology, partisanship were asked post treatment)

2)      Value threat prime (asked about ideology, partisanship and a series of partisan-as-social identity questions, then asked about the extent they felt the Republican party has strayed from core value of decency and purity)

3)      Identity threat prime (asked the degree the Republican party is falling apart and lacking consensus – using a asymmetric scale – meaning one was forced to at least somewhat agree)

4)      Accuracy prime  (ideology and partisanship were asked post treatment, and participants were told they were going to read a PSA and asked to be even handed and then told they would need to evaluate the announcement and explain how they arrived at their answers)

(Yes, it is manipulative and why it is called an experiment.)

They were also asked about their climate change beliefs (collapsed into a scale), their intended climate behaviors (buy an electrical car, etc) collapsed into a scale, and their support for five climate friendly policies (tax credits, government investment, etc) collapsed into a scale.  (If you would like the exact wording – download the supplemental information)

FINDINGS

In looking at the results and when taken together, “ the motivational matching and the motivational distinctiveness analyses offer a clear conclusion. A message—whether it included credible information, moral value framing, or group norms—had a greater impact on beliefs and behavioral intentions when individuals’ underlying motivations matched the nature of the message.”

What I personally find most interesting is almost a throw away line in the conclusion:  “The greater strength of the norms message relative to the values message suggests a motivational priority of concerns with group identity over concerns about upholding moral values regarding this issue.”  Once again, we see the strength of partisanship and polarization rearing its ugly head.

Another interesting non-result is knowing that Republicans generally believe climate change is happening, they “did not push for climate change policies.”  Why?  Is it a way of hedging?  Or is there an additional motivation not explored such as Republicans antithesis to big government solutions proposed?

All the BEST Polls Agree With Me

In today’s Science Friday, we explore biases in polling – BUT we explore it from the angle of the interpretation of polls. 

In a paper from Madison & Hillygus (both from Duke), they conclude that while most political nerds will evaluate a poll by reviewing the methodology, sample size, and question wording, “we find a significant factor in respondent assessments of polling credibility to be the poll results themselves.”  Said a different way they “found that polls were perceived as more credible when they matched a respondent’s prior opinions and less credible when they did not.”

Experiments

The researchers conducted two experiments – one with polling a candidate and one with polling a policy issue.   It was a relatively simple experiment design – measure your priors, introduce polling, measure the change in your perceptions. 

In both instances, the researchers find motivate reasoning.  

“Overall, these results of attitude polarization, together with the findings above showing a poll’s perceived credibility being conditional on congruence with prior beliefs, indicates that evaluations of polling information are biased by motivated reasoning.

Conclusions

This finding is concerning.  We often use polls to pop “bubbles” that politicians and consultants find themselves to be in. 

We position survey research and polling as “objective” research and a way to check critical assumptions.  This study illustrates that polling results are not being absorbed objectively. 

However, if the hyper-partisan political atmosphere is allowing political actors to disregard any research finding, we are in dangerous territory.  

citation:  Madson, G.J., Hillygus, D.S. All the Best Polls Agree with Me: Bias in Evaluations of Political Polling. Polit Behav 42, 1055–1072 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09532-1

 

download the paper