TRENDS: Following the Money? How Donor Information Affects Public Opinion about Initiatives

Abstract

Citizens are typically uninformed about politics and know little about issues at stake in direct democracy elections. Government efforts to inform electorates include requiring donors to initiative campaigns to report their activities and then circulating such donor information to citizens. What effects does donor information have on citizens’ opinions? We conduct a survey experiment where respondents express opinions about initiatives in a real-world election. We manipulate whether they receive donor information, party cues, policy information from a nonpartisan expert, or no additional information. We find that donor information influences citizens’ opinions in the aggregate, with effects comparable to those of party cues and policy information. However, donor information has negligible effects on uninformed citizens, who have difficulty inferring donors’ policy interests and connecting them to their own. These results underscore the potential benefits of efforts to inform electorates via disclosure laws and highlight disparities in their effectiveness for informed and uninformed citizens.

Ads and Editorials: How Pretreatment Reduces the Persuasiveness of Interest Group Advertisements

“…On one level campaign names, nonthreatening and generic, work so well because they are populist sounding (Groenendyk and Valentino, 2005). On another level, the more specific major donor disclosure regulations are persuasive or create a backlash (Dowling and Wichowsky, 2013;Boudreau and MacKenzie, 2021). In reality, disclosures help voters but the effect sizes are likely smaller in a campaign environment.…”

Taking Cues from the Government: Heuristic versus Systematic Processing in a Constitutional Referendum

“…In so-called dual process models of reasoning, such heuristic reasoning is contrasted with more systematic reasoning, based on detailed information search and consideration of different arguments (Chaiken 1980;Kahneman 2013;Petty and Cacioppo 1986). Indeed, recent studies suggest that in direct democratic decisions, reliance on policy arguments is less uncommon than suspected by critics of direct democracy (Boudreau and MacKenzie 2014;Bullock 2011;Colombo and Kriesi 2017). When policy arguments are available, voters often rely on those arguments to make their decisions and, what is more, they are often familiar with the main arguments of the campaign (Colombo 2016).…”

Dark Money and Voter Learning

“…5 The argument that heuristics improve voter competence extends to campaign finance information. Empirical research has shown that financial information cues can affect assessments of candidates Wichowsky 2013, 2015;Dowling and Miller 2016;Prat, Puglisi and Snyder Jr. 2010;Rhodes et al 2019), including ideological information (Oklobdzija 2019), assessments of policy initiatives (Boudreau and MacKenzie 2021), perceptions of political corruption (Spencer and Theodoridis 2020), vote choice (Robinson 2022), 6 news coverage of money in politics (La Raja 2007), and the efficacy of political advertising (Brooks and Murov 2012;Ridout, Franz and Fowler 2015;Weber, Dunaway and Johnson 2012). In addition, recent research shows that voters respond to both campaign finance information and cues about compliance with campaign finance transparency principles (Wood 2022;Wood and Grose 2020).…”