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.

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?