Paths of Recruitment: Rational Social Prospecting in Petition Canvassing

Petition canvassers are political recruiters. Building upon the rational prospector model, we theorize that rational recruiting strategies are dynamic (Bayesian and time-conscious), spatial (constrained by geography), and social (conditioned on relations between canvasser and prospect). Our theory predicts that canvassers will exhibit homophily in their canvassing preferences and will alternate between “door-to-door” and “attractor” (working in a central location) strategies based upon systematic geographical variation. They will adjust their strategies midstream (mid-petition) based upon experience. Introducing methods to analyze canvassing data, we test these hypotheses on geocoded signatory lists from two petition drives—a 2005–6 anti–Iraq War initiative in Wisconsin and an 1839 antislavery campaign in New York City. Canvassers in these campaigns exhibited homophily to the point of following geographically and politically “inefficient” paths. In the aggregate, these patterns may exacerbate political inequality, limiting political involvement of the poorer and less educated. Replication Materials: The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GZA3GY. Political campaigns and movements try their best to attract new supporters, a process that challenges campaigns and their workers. Whether in petitioning or in fundraising, identifying and recruiting supporters requires a situated rationality that operates in social and geographical space. It requires thinking about where, geographically and in social networks, friends of a campaign are likely to be found. A recruiter must not only act on existing knowledge of groups being targeted for recruitment, but must also revisit her strategies and judgments in light of experience. A recruiter learns, adapts, and strategizes anew in a world where information is scarce and failure is more common than success. For at least a decade, the dominant model of prospecting has reflected some of these realities but not others. In a now classic article, Brady, Schlozman, and Verba (1999) articulated and tested the “rational Clayton Nall is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Stanford University, 616 Serra Street, Stanford, CA 94305 ([email protected]). Benjamin Schneer is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Florida State University, 113 Collegiate Loop, 531 Bellamy, Tallahassee, FL 32306 ([email protected]). Daniel Carpenter is Freed Professor of Government, Department of Government, Harvard University, Center for Government and International Studies, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 ([email protected]). We thank David Broockman, Jeffrey Friedman, Michael Heaney, Michael Herron, Eitan Hersh, Josh Kalla, Dean Lacy, Maggie McKinley, Melissa Sands, Sidney Verba, and discussants and audiences at the Dartmouth American Politics Workshop (2015) and the PolNet conference (2016). For research support, we acknowledge the Center for American Political Studies and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. prospector model” of political recruitment. The core insight is that “like bank robbers going where the money is,” recruiters seek support among those whose participation potential is high (Brady, Schlozman, and Verba 1999, 154). The recruiter first uses information to find prospects and then “gets to yes” by offering inducements, including information and material benefits. These inducements capitalize on leverage, “the relationship to a particular recruiter that gives the prospect a special incentive to assent” (Brady, Schlozman, and Verba 1999, 155). Drawing on survey evidence, they find that individuals who have high civic skills and resources are more likely to be recruited. Organizational recruiting may hence induce adverse selection by selecting those already predisposed to participate (Enos, Fowler, and Vavreck 2014). The rational prospector model helpfully warns of the potential political inequality arising from American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 62, No. 1, January 2018, Pp. 192–209 C ©2017, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12305