Political Giving As Civic Participation
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 4-9-2018 Political Giving as Civic Participation: Identifying Donors and Motivating Giving Robyn Lynn Stiles Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Other Political Science Commons, and the Social Influence and Political Communication Commons Recommended Citation Stiles, Robyn Lynn, "Political Giving as Civic Participation: Identifying Donors and Motivating Giving" (2018). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 4557. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/4557 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. POLITICAL GIVING AS CIVIC PARTICIPATION: IDENTIFYING DONORS AND MOTIVATING GIVING A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Manship School of Mass Communication by Robyn Lynn Stiles B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 2011 M.P.S., George Washington University, 2013 May 2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my great appreciation for my committee: Dr. Martin Johnson (Chair), Dr. Kathleen Searles, Dr. Joshua Darr, Dr. James Garand, and Dr. Sonya Hayes. Thank you for your support, your endless patience, and for taking the time to guide me through this process. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with and learn from each of you. Next, I would like to thank Dr. Christopher Mann, without whom I would not chosen to attend Louisiana State University. Thank you for acting as my sounding block and helping me navigate between two disparate worlds. I also owe a great deal of gratitude to Dr. Nichole Bauer, who took the time to have many conversations with me about gender and political engagement. Ali Akbar has been a close friend and supporter of my work. Thank you for loaning me the reins to your organizations and letting me bounce ideas off you. I am grateful for my fellow graduate students who have been my friends and support throughout the writing process. I would specifically like to thank Elisabeth Fondren, Dr. Mingxiao Sui, Minjie Li, Kirill Bryanov, Rui Wang, Paromita Saha, and Christina Cota-Robles for making my years at LSU memorable. Finally, completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without my parents, Dale and Esther Stiles. Thank you for instilling in me a love of learning and for giving me the world. I could not have eaten this elephant without your unflagging support. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS….........................................................................................................ii LIST OF TABLES…......................................................................................................................iv ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………........................1 CHAPTER 2. UNDERSTANDING WHO GIVES AND WHY THEY DO SO …........................................................................................................8 CHAPTER 3. GENDER AND POLITICAL GIVING: AN ANALYSIS OF SECONDARY SURVEY DATA................................................................47 CHAPTER 4. DOES ASKING MATTER? TWO FIELD EXPERIMENTS IN CONTEXT ………...............................................................60 CHAPTER 5. STRATEGIC APPEALS FOR PROMPTING GIVING........................................79 CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSION…………….….............................................................................88 REFERENCES............................................................................................................................105 APPENDIX..................................................................................................................................117 A. ADDITIVE GIVING EXPERIMENT TREATMENTS: EXPERIMENT 1, LOUISIANA VICTORY FUND……………………….…………. 117 B. ADDITIVE GIVING EXPERIMENT TREATMENTS: EXPERIMENT 2, BLACK CONSERVATIVES FUND……………….……………...120 C. STRATEGY-BASED GIVING EXPERIMENT TREATMENTS: LOUISIANA VICTORY FUND………….…..……………..........................................123 D. IRB APPROVAL FOR EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES …….....................................126 VITA…………............................................................................................................................127 iii LIST OF TABLES Table 3.1. Summary of Logistic Regression Models Predicting Giving…….............................................................................................................56 Table 4.1. Description of Contact Type and Link Direction………..………………….........63 Table 4.2. Delivery and Open Rates by Treatment Group......................................................66 Table 4.3. Click Rates by Treatment Group ...........................................................................68 Table 4.4. Tukey Post Hoc Comparison of Click Rates by Treatment Group……..………..69 Table 4.5. Click Rates by Treatment Group ...........................................................................74 Table 4.6. Tukey Post Hoc Comparisons of Open Rates by Treatment Group…...................75 Table 4.7. Click Rates by Treatment Group………………………………………………....76 Table 4.8. Tukey Post Hoc Comparisons of Click Rates by Treatment Group.......................76 Table 5.1: Delivery and Open Rates by Treatment Group......................................................83 Table 5.2. Tukey Post Hoc Comparisons of Open Rates by Treatment Group ......................84 Table 5.3. Click Rates by Treatment Group............................................................................85 . Table 5.4. Click Means and Standard Deviation by Treatment Group ...................................85 Table 5.5. Tukey Post Hoc Comparisons of Click Rates by Treatment Group…………..….86 Table 5.6. Significant Tukey Post Hoc Comparisons by Treatment Group……………..…..87 iv ABSTRACT The study of political donations has previously been limited to surveys of identified donors and analysis of reported giving data, and oftentimes limited to higher-dollar donors. A comprehensive review of the current political giving literature yields two distinct questions: first, what role do resources play in determining who gives, and second, what ultimately prompts people to donate to a political organization? I utilize secondary survey data in my first chapter to examine the role of resources and gender in political giving. This chapter provides insight to whether gender merely represents the availability of resources necessary for participation, or whether it is indicative of differing implicit motivations that drive giving. I use three original, partnered field experiments, two of which are fielded with a state-level political action committee, and one that is fielded with a national PAC, to examine which type of strategic appeal most effectively motivates political giving. These chapters yield several distinctive findings. First, while resources ultimately predict who gives to political organizations, gender is marker not only of differing levels of resources but also of different intrinsic motivations for giving. Second, in line with practitioner best practices, explicitly asking supporters to donate does generate donations; however, non- solicitations ultimately drive more traffic to organizations’ websites. Added minor costs – or barriers – to giving do not seem to deter or depress the rate of donations. Finally, I find that when pitted directly against each other, appeals using temporal urgency to prompt giving outperform expressions of gratitude and policy-related anxiety induction. This indicates that we might not fully understanding of what costliness is, in terms of political giving and online political activity. These findings also shed light on the strategies that effectively motivate alternative forms of civic participation. v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION Within political science, civic engagement is almost always conceptualized as a question of whether or not someone has voted (Wattenberg, 2007). But voting is not the only measure of civic engagement. Citizens choose to engage civically in many different ways, such as joining a political party, volunteering for a campaign or nonprofit, running for office, protesting, letter or email writing, or donating financially to political organizations (Wattenberg, 2007; Dalton, 2008b). More recently, we have seen a shift from traditional, duty-based civic engagement (voting) to modern, alternative forms of engagement-participation such as signing petitions, boycotting or protesting, recycling, and volunteerism (Dalton, 2008b). The number of people who choose to participate by donating money to political causes are, admittedly, a small group, and largely unrepresentative of the U.S. electorate (Panagopoulos & Bergan, 2006; Lipsitz & Panagopoulos, 2011). Less than one half percent of Americans donated $200 or more to a federal campaign during the 2012 election cycle (Donor demographics, 2017). To put this in perspective with another comparison, widely