David Lassen and Dr. David B. Magleby, College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences
A record number of individuals financially contributed to presidential candidates during the 2008 election cycle. Many academic researchers and pundits have speculated on why these individuals chose to participate in this manner, often asserting that donors likely anticipated a personal material or policy reward for their support. Others have suggested that social similarities between donor and candidate may have played an important role. Little research exists, however, on the impact that an individual’s affiliation with an “apolitical” social group can have on their contribution decisions. I use the term here to characterize a group whose primary purpose is something other than political in nature. For example, political actions are, arguably, a secondary decision for religious, business, ethnic, or gender groups. My findings suggest that such associations exert an important effect on an individual’s donation decisions and should be examined further in the future.
Correctly assigning individual motivations to donors, however, has historically been a thorny task. Researchers in the past have traditionally relied on either Federal Election Commission (FEC) records or individual reports of donation to identify subjects of interest. These methods, though, are each likely to introduce bias into overall results. FEC records are reported by donation, not donor, and are often ambiguous, with individual donor names and contact information potentially listed in more than a dozen ways. Evidence also suggests that individual recall of donation behavior is inherently flawed due to over-reporting.
Dean David B. Magleby, Dr. Jay Goodliffe, Dr. Joseph Olsen, along with an extended team of faculty and undergraduate students in the Computer Science and Political Science departments at BYU, have recently developed a computer algorithm to largely overcome the difficulties of FEC records. A portion of the extended development and testing process associated with this software was also part of my ORCA funded project. This portion of the project was the most prone to setback and difficulty and ultimately required several months of focused effort to complete. Using this software, we conducted a survey of donors living in Utah and Colorado. We administered this survey in February 2009.
I participated at all stages in the project: helping to draw a sample of donors to survey, write our questionnaire, administer the survey, collect responses, and conduct post-administration analysis. My purpose in the study was to assess the influence some donors’ personal identification with an apolitical group (the Mormon Church) had on their decision to donate to a candidate who shares their apolitical group affiliation (Mitt Romney), during the 2008 presidential primary. To accomplish this, I used a multidisciplinary approach combining elements of research in political science and social psychology.
Individual motivations for campaign contributions has long been a popular topic in political science literature, with many basing their work on Peter B. Clark and James Q. Wilson’s typology that classifies the motivations for political participation as either materialistic (tangible), purposive (policy or ideological), or solidary (social or group-based). Little formal work exists, however, on solidary motivations. Some have also suggested that Clark and Wilson’s typology can be difficult to apply to specific moments in American politics. Work by Henri Tajfel in social psychology may help address these difficulties.
Tajfel’s most relevant work in this area is his social identity theory (SIT), originally developed in 1974. This theory states that individuals inherently categorize themselves and those around them in a series of groups. People then observe and define a social hierarchy among these groups and ultimately define their own sense of self worth by their own group affiliations. At the same time, individuals are likely motivated to bolster their self esteem by attempting to affiliate with as high-status groups as possible. Individuals are likely to change their group affiliation in this effort. Other work in SIT suggests that some individuals are likely, instead, to attempt to improve the social standing of their group as whole. This is especially the case when group members do not consider changing their affiliation as a viable option. Work in religious identification suggests that is the likely case for members of religious organizations.
Because of these findings, I made the following three hypotheses: 1) Mormon donors to Romney would be more likely than other donors to perceive anti-Romney bias during the campaign, 2) an individual’s personal identification as a Mormon would be the most influential factor in predicting their donation to Romney (even more than their party identification), and 3) that Romney’s presence as a legitimate, ingroup candidate would have motivated some Mormons, who had never before financially contributed to a political candidate, to donate to his campaign. Survey results provided evidence that each of these hypotheses is accurate, although less strongly for hypothesis three.
Interestingly and unexpectedly, I also found a distinct geographic component to donor motivation. Donor propensities to give to Romney were distinctly higher for Mormon donors in Colorado than they were in Utah. I theorize that this may be due to the closer proximity of other group members in Utah as compared with Colorado, but this possibility needs more examination.
Ultimately, our results were encouraging and suggest that political science research on the motivations of individual campaign donors should be expanded to include the influence of apolitical group affiliations. Future research need not be limited to voluntary organizations such as a religious group, but could also include African American supporters of Barack Obama or female supporters of Hillary Clinton. Combining the above noted theories with our recent methodological innovations should yield a rich harvest.
References
- Barry C. Burden, 2000, “Voter Turnout and the National Election Studies,” Political Analysis 8 (4): 389-98.
- Specific thanks should also be given to Christophe Giraud-Carrier (computer science), Yao Huang (computer science), and Bradley Jones (political science) for their contributions as part of this team.
- Peter B. Clark and James Q. Wilson, 1961, “Incentive systems: A theory of organizations,” Administrative Science Quarterly (September): 129–66.
- Penny M. Miller, Malcolm E. Jewell, Lee Sigelman, 1987, “Reconsidering a Typology of Incentives among Campaign Activists: A Research Note,” The Western Political Quarterly 40 (3): 519-26.
- Henri Tajfel, 1974, “Social Identity and Intergroup Behavior,” Social Science Information 13 (2): 65-93.
- Naomi Ellemers, Ad Van Knippenberg, Nanne De Vries, and Henk Wilke, 1988, “Social Identification and Permeability of Group Boundaries,” European Journal of Social Psychology 18: 497-513.