The Impact of Relational Goods on Political Participation: Evidence from 2020

• In Event: Candidates and Campaigns in U.S. Politics

Abstract

The 2020 presidential election year provided unusual circumstances for political participation. The Covid-19 pandemic curtailed customary opportunities for electoral participation, both campaigning and voting, while generating some new ones at the same time as it launched protests and controversy. Deaths of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement triggered racial justice protests, becoming widespread after the murder of George Floyd and continuing. Protests on the right were visible and appeared to be more numerous than before. And protests seemed to involve much larger crowds and more diverse participants than in recent years. Under these circumstances, we ask whether what we know from past research about the characteristics of participants -- socio-demographic, psychological, and otherwise – still applies, or whether the explanations of activity need to be modified. Even if the same explanations hold overall, the political and contextual circumstances of 2020 suggest the conclusions may vary by racial and ethnic group and gender and may vary by activity, notably for protest.

In particular, we examine whether “relational goods” play a similar role in explaining 2020 activity as in prior years. Relational goods provide an overall conceptual umbrella for incorporating people’s desire for social embeddedness into explanations of political participation. Relational goods are neither public goods nor private goods but can only exist by mutual agreement as part of a relationship with non-arbitrary others. They are operationalized both here and in prior work by assessing the degree to which respondents think that people whom they care about consider it important to take specific actions. The shifts in protest starting in 2020 suggest competing hypotheses for the importance of relational goods as an explanation. On the one hand, the larger numbers of protesters made the activity even more normalized than before, so social approval might not be relevant. On the other hand, since the issues in the racial equity protests are closely tied to African Americans, and resonate differently by race and ethnicity, the role of relational goods (and other factors associated with protest) may have varied role by race. The perception that the 2020 vote carried high stakes might also have affected the importance of relational goods for campaigning and voting.

Understanding the role of relational goods has broader theoretical significance. They provide an answer to the larger question of why people contribute to collective action to obtain a public good even when their own behavior has little effect on the probability of the outcome. This has been a longstanding theoretical puzzle, since of course some people do take collective action, both in politics and in other spheres. We have argued that people who value relational goods will engage in collective action, including political participation, even when otherwise it would be more rational for them to free ride on the activity of others. Furthermore, the relational goods theory of action helps explain the mechanisms of recruitment.

Prior empirical work supports the theoretical idea. Data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS 2016) showed that relational goods significantly contributed (both substantively and statistically) to political participation. Respondents who thought that people they cared about considered political activity important were indeed much more likely to participate in multiple types of participation, even after accounting for other known factors related to level of activity. This result held for both men and women in different ethnic and racial groups.

The present research builds on those earlier empirical results using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS 2020). The 2020 CMPS main samples include approximately 15,000 respondents, with approximately 4000 each Asian American, African American, and Latina/o, and 3000 White, not-Hispanic adults, both citizens and noncitizens. The data were collected between April 2, 2021 and August 25, 2021. The survey items cover the variables identified here as well as many other explanators. Within the 2020 study, respondents’ current protest can be compared with their past protest activity. In addition, protest can be differentiated by issue. There is enough overlap with the 2016 study to permit some other, but limited, comparisons across time, including a limited guess as to whether the importance of relational goods grew or shrank between these two time points.

This paper assesses the determinants of participation in 2020 across multiple types of participation assessing differences by gender and by race or ethnicity, including assessing the importance of relational goods versus other determinants of activity.

Authors

• Danvy Le, California State University, East Bay

• Carole Jean Uhlaner, University of California, Irvine