Research In Progress: Which Voters are Persuadable?
by Sebastian Stockman, IQSS October 15, 2007
In a recent New York Times Book Review piece, the writer Jonathan Rauch assessed one of the broad splits in the conservative movement this way: "Libertarians and traditionalists disagree on the relative importance of liberty and virtue; many neocons care not a fig about abortion, while religious conservatives often seem to care about little else."
Just so. There are two big tents in American politics, and people who share the same tent aren't always inclined to agree. In The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns (coming Spring 2008 from Princeton University Press), Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Government D. Sunshine Hillygus and University of Arkansas Professor Todd G. Shields argue that both Republican and Democratic campaigns have, in recent years, increasingly targeted those disgruntled tent-dwellers on the other side.
"In the past it's been assumed that the people who can be moved are [the] unengaged," Hillygus said. "Now it's the 'otherwise-partisans.' Like someone who is pro-choice, but otherwise Republican. [Campaigns] try to increase the salience of that particular issue to that voter."
How are parties and campaigns doing this? Micro-targeting.
"They no longer just do polls in broad areas," Hillygus said. "They now have information about individual names and addresses, [about] turnout, magazine subscriptions, church directories, interest groups and whether you live in a battleground state. Critically, that lets them individualize their message to you."
The 2004 election cycle was a "perfect example," Hillygus says. The Bush and Kerry campaigns sent out direct mail on 75 different issues.
"While the media and television ads are talking about broad issues like the economy, direct mail is focused on these narrower issues," Hillygus said. After the election, pundits and journalists debated if the election was about moral issues like gay marriage and abortion. "The election was about different things to different people-voters were told that their pet issue was at stake in the election."
This has consequences for both elections and governance.
"Given that [candidates are] taking positions on 75 different issues in direct mail, there's not really a collective campaign dialogue" going on in the electorate, Hillygus said. "When we think about new technology, what's been overlooked is its impact not just on how candidates communicate, but also on what they're willing to say."
Candidates are willing to take positions on more issues and more divisive issues in microtargeted direct mail than they would in broadcast communications.
Moreover, once elected how can the candidate take action on these 75 different issues? And how will voters respond when they realize that their pet issue is not actually a governing priority of the winning candidate?
That part's not clear yet. What is clear is that the micro-targeting, data-mining campaign isn't going away. It's just getting started.
The microtargeting strategy has been enabled by advances in computing and statistical power. But, Hillygus said, "The Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, which required states to compile computerized databases of their voter roles, really got things rolling." These databases provide the names, addresses, party registration, and voting history of every registered voter in the state.
"To compile this much information in the past, [campaigns] would have had to go to hundreds of different counties and copy paper files," Hillygus said. "Now, in California, you can pay 35 dollars for a computerized list of millions of voters.
"It's the same thing that is going on in the commercial world. There's a whole information industry built around compiling information about individual consumers. They collect information on everything from your driving record to your mortgage information. We don't always realize the information trail we leave every time we take out a loan or use our Stop and Shop card. This information can be used to predict how you will behave in the consumer world and in the political world."
Campaigns use this information to figure out who they want to target and with what messages, and who they can ignore. And this doesn't bode well for the country's already-low voter-turnout rate.
"[Campaigns] use individual voter information to campaign more efficiently. They used to canvass entire neighborhoods," Hillygus said. "Now they canvass individual households. If you are not registered to vote, you will be ignored. But one of the biggest predictors of whether you turn out to vote is whether you're asked to."
Despite these negative consequences to microtargeting, Hillygus predicts it will continue.
"The future is even more information about individual voters. Companies are promising to scrape information from the millions of resumes that are online, adding that information to the databases, Hillygus said. "With technology, there's no turning back."
The Program on Survey Research
Hillygus's research on voting behavior relies on extensive survey research, which seems appropriate as she is the director of the Program on Survey Research, a research program of IQSS. Although Hillygus has been interested in campaigns since she was a freshman at the University of Arkansas in 1992-when she started working on then governor Clinton's presidential campaign-she developed a background in survey research methods as a graduate student at Stanford University. Fortuitously, Hillygus started working with Prof. Norman Nie as a first-year graduate student, just as he was creating the survey research firm, Knowledge Networks. While Nie was staying busy in the Silicon Valley tech boom of the late 1990s, Hillygus managed and ran the survey projects for Nie's Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society.
"Like many survey research scholars, I learned survey research by doing survey research" Hillygus said. "When I first started writing questionnaires I made the same rookie mistakes I now see others making."
The Program on Survey Research is designed to help others avoid those easy mistakes, as well as let scholars from across disciplines share knowledge, expertise, and interests in survey research methods.
"I initially envisioned PSR as something quite small-the so-called 'strength of weak ties'-but our activities have been so successful that we have really expanded our vision and goals," Hillygus said.
The PSR's executive committee now includes members of not just the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but Harvard Law School, the Medical School, the Kennedy School and the School of Public Health. The Program holds an annual conference that brings in 65-70 people. This spring the conference will be held on May 9 on the topic of New Technologies and Survey Research. There is also a full-time preceptor in survey research, Chase Harrison, who teaches courses in Survey Research and is available for consultation to members of the Harvard community, if you have a survey of your own.
"It's so striking how many scholars decide to do a survey but don't realize that there is an entire field of research that should inform the design and implementation of a survey," Hillygus said. "There are a lot of common mistakes that are easy for us to point out."
Some of those common mistakes can be headed off at the pass by checking out the tip sheets at the PSR website