Campaign Volunteers as Representative Agents

• In Event: Constituency-Level Politics

Abstract

Congressional campaigns rely extensively on campaign volunteers to communicate with voters. Relying on theories of principle-agent relationships, previous research has argued that campaigns should want moderate volunteers who will best be suited to convey moderate messages to undecided swing voters (or even non-volunteer partisans). By this view, the prevalence of ideologically extreme volunteers stems from the limited pool of potential volunteers who hold more extreme ideological positions. In this paper, we argue that this is not the case and that the ideological extremity of campaign volunteers is reflective of campaigns’ desires for volunteers who are faithful agents. Using interviews with campaign practitioners, a conjoint experiment fielded with campaign staff, and a correspondence experiment run with congressional campaigns, we show that campaigns prefer more extreme volunteers and that campaigns’ preferences for volunteer ideology mirrors that of the campaign. We also find that campaigns prefer volunteers who are dedicated and responsive to campaign instructions, and look like key constituencies. On the whole, we find that campaigns appear to prefer volunteers whose characteristics mitigate principal-agent problems, including ideologies align with that of the campaign.

Authors

• Taylor Kinsley Chewning, Florida State University

• Jon Green, Northeastern University

• Hans J.G. Hassell, Florida State University

• Matthew R Miles, Brigham Young University, Idaho