The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Paths of Recruitment: Rational Social Prospecting in Petition Canvassing
Open accessAbstract
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.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“A potential hurdle, given residential partisan sorting (Brown & Enos, 2021), media partisan sorting (Broockman & Kalla, 2023b), and patterns of canvassing (Nall et al., 2018) is homogenous networks.”
From How to study democratic backsliding (2024) · cites this paper as Nall et al., 2018
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 24
- Applegate David L., 2011, The Traveling Salesman Problem: A Computational Study
- 10.2307/2951539 · DOI
- Bellman Richard, 1957, Dynamic Programming
- 10.2307/2585767 · DOI
- 10.1017/S000305541400029X · DOI
- Carter Daniel T., 1996, Legacy of Rage: George Wallace and the Transformation of American Politics, Journal of Southern History, 62, 3, 10.2307/2211204 · DOI
- Cruickshank Peter, 2010, Electronic Government and Electronic Participation, 275
- 10.1017/S0022381613001308 · DOI
- 10.1017/S0003055415000064 · DOI
- 10.1080/01615440309601214 · DOI
- 10.2307/2585837 · DOI
- Gittins J. C., 1989, Multi‐armed Bandit Allocation Indices
- 10.1017/S000305541600006X · DOI
- 10.1177/1532673X07300763 · DOI
- Jentz John B., 1981, The Antislavery Constituency in Jacksonian New York City, Civil War History, 27, 101, 10.1353/cwh.1981.0031 · DOI
- John Peter, 2013, Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Experimenting with Ways to Change Civic Behaviour
- 10.1145/2470654.2470770 · DOI
- 10.1086/228463 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1017/S0003055413000439 · DOI
- 10.1515/9781400838783 · DOI
- 10.1007/s11109-011-9161-1 · DOI
- Rosenstone Steven, 1993, Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America
- Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, 2012, Initiative, Referendum, and Recall in Wisconsin
- Tulchin Allan., 2010, That Men Would Praise the Lord: The Triumph of Protestantism in Nîmes, 1530–1570, 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199736522.001.0001 · DOI
Cited by
Sorted by citations
How to study democratic backsliding
Druckman, J. N. (2024) · Political Psychology · doi:10.1111/pops.12942 · Cited by 56
Metadata
- Authors
- Nall, C., Schneer, B., & Carpenter, D.
- Affiliations
- Stanford University (US)
- Florida State University (US)
- Harvard University (US)
- Venue
- American Journal of Political Science
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2017-04-21
- Volume
- 62
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 192-209
- ISSN
- 0092-5853 (ISSN-L)
- 1540-5907
- OpenAlex
- W3125621444
- Cited by
- 13
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 1 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 6.75
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Locations
- American Journal of Political Science (publishedVersion)
- SSRN Electronic Journal (publishedVersion)
- Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social Capital and Networks
- Keywords
- political recruitment, homophily, door-to-door canvassing, Bayesian updating, political inequality, political participation, geocoded data
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
