Something that occurred to me at a dinner discussion about campaign finance a few days ago. Someone mentioned the extraordinary ease with which you can find online FEC data that is nicely sorted out geographically so as to figure out who your neighbors contributed to and when. This reminded me of Diana Mutz’s work on the relationship between cross-party discussion and participation – roughly speaking, Mutz finds that the more that you talk to people who have different political views than your own, the less likely you are to participate in politics.
What connects FEC data and Mutz’s work is one of the mechanisms that Mutz identifies. She suggests that one key reason why people may be less likely to participate in politics when they have politically diverse social networks is because they don’t want to upset friends and neighbors, by engaging in public acts of participation that demonstrate their political differences. But doesn’t the combination of geolocation, roll-yer-own Google Map APIs and electronic FEC data make contributing money (above $200) into a public act? If your neighbors can see how much money you’ve given, and to who, then your calculus for whether to give money or not may change. If you are in a heterogenous neighborhood, Mutz’s argument would suggest that you will be less likely to give money (it would allow the leftier-than-thou folks across the street to figure out that you have a sneaking regard for John McCain. In contrast, if you are in a more homogenous neighborhood, demonstration effects and so on may make you more likely to make that donation.
This is, as the post suggests, a claim in search of evidence, and any effect may quite possibly be swamped by the influence of other causal factors. But it does at least suggest that the impact of new technology and more information, cheaper search costs etc may not always be to increase political participation, as some technological evangelists have suggested.
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On the subject of neighbors influencing participation, you may also be interested in:
Gerber, A. S., Green, D. P., and Larimer, C. W. (2008). Social pressure and voter
turnout: Evidence from a large-scale ?eld experiment. American Political Science Review, 102(01):33–48.
Gimpel, J. G., Dyck, J. J., and Shaw, D. R. (2004). Registrants, voters, and turnout
variability across neighborhoods. Political Behavior, 26(4):343–375.
Green et al. might argue that changes in participatory behavior might be most obvious when we know someone is watching. I doubt many people consider their neighbors looking up FEC data when they donate.
Gimpel et al. find evidence that speaks to the issues of homogenous vs. heterogenous neighborhoods. Causation is a bigger issue in this study, but it may have more validity on the question you’re asking.
The problem with using FEC data to test a hypothesis public disclosure makes individual’s giving more sensitive to the political composition of their contexts is that FEC disclosure rules are constant, and we do not have data on federal contributions before those disclosures were required.
That said, might it be possible to leverage state-level variation in disclosure rules? Of course, as Mark points out above, that requires some public awareness of these disclosure rules …
Another problem with using state (and local) disclosure, is that it tends not to be sorted as well by the respective governments as FEC data. It’s sort of incredible, considering how much money can be spent at the state level, how far behind the federal government many – maybe all – states are in providing access to campaign finance data. And its not like the federal government is doing the best it could (see the problems with Senate electronic disclosures).
I don’t believe that many people who are capable of and willing to donate more than $200.00 to any campaign is likely to worry about what their neighbors might think of their political affiliation.
Once anyone gets to the point where they can afford that kind of investment in something like a political campaign isn’t likely to have any negative outcome caused by that investment. They are likely set and I can’t imagine they would lose much if they pick the wrong horse.
If these donations were more freely available and maybe broadcast, that might change things.
But anybody willing to pony up that kind of money for a Federal campaign isn’t likely to care what their neighbor thinks. They might even donate just to piss off the guy across the street with a McCain sign in his yard.
What if conversations with people whose views differ from your own make you less certain about how right yous are?
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