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Title: Paths of Recruitment: Rational Social Prospecting Petition Canvassing

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2015

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Abstract: Petition canvassers are political recruiters. Building upon the rational prospector model, we posit that politically rational recruitment is dynamic (Bayesian and time-conscious), spatial (conducted within a landscape that constrains the recruiter) and social (in which strategies are conditioned on social relations between canvasser and prospect). Incorporating these insights into a formal model, we predict that dynamic, social canvassers will exhibit homophily in their canvassing preferences (to the point of following geographically and politically inefficient paths), will alternate between door-to-door and attractor strategies based upon systematic geographical variation, and will adjust their strategies midstream (mid-petition) based upon experience. Utilizing newly developed methods for characterizing signatory address sequences, we test these hypotheses using geocoded signatory lists from two petition campaignsthe 2005-2006 anti-Iraq War mobilization in Wisconsin, and the 1839 antislavery petition campaign in New York City. Canvassers in these campaigns exploited homophily in their work and systematically adjusted their behavior mid-petition in response to evidence.

Url: http://web.stanford.edu/~nall/docs/ppweb.pdf

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Authors: Nall, Clayton; Schneer, Benjamin; Carpenter, Dan

Publisher: Stanford University

Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Other

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