Implicit Cue-Taking in Elections

Berinsky, Adam J.; Benedictis-Kessner, Justin de; Goldberg, Megan; Margolis, Michele F.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2501452

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Laboratory subjects can decipher the political party affiliation of both unfamiliar elected officials and college students (Rule and Ambady 2010) and can identify the political ideology of unknown politicians (Bull and Hawkes 1982), including those from other countries (Samochowiec, Wänke, and Fiedler 2010). 10 These inferences can be based on the appearance and characteristics of a candidate’s supporters: Berinsky et al (2014) use a survey experiment to demonstrate that the images of a candidate’s putative supporters as displayed on campaign material are used by voters to infer traits about the candidate.…”

Section: The Ground Campaign’s Principal-agent Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Party Activists as Campaign Advertisers: The Ground Campaign as a Principal-Agent Problem

Enos

Hersh

2015

Am Polit Sci Rev

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A s a key element of their strategy, recent Presidential campaigns have recruited thousands of workers to engage in direct voter contact. We conceive of this strategy as a principal-agent problem. Workers engaged in direct contact are intermediaries between candidates and voters, but they may be ill-suited to convey messages to general-election audiences. By analyzing a survey of workers fielded in partnership with the 2012 Obama campaign, we show that in the context of the campaign widely considered most adept at direct contact, individuals who were interacting with swing voters on the campaign's behalf were demographically unrepresentative, ideologically extreme, cared about atypical issues, and misunderstood the voters' priorities. We find little evidence that the campaign was able to use strategies of agent control to mitigate its principal-agent problem. We question whether individuals typically willing to be volunteer surrogates are productive agents for a strategic campaign.

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