Campaign Principal-Agent Problems: Volunteers as Faithful and Representative Agents

Volunteer-based voter contact presents multiple potential principal-agent problems for political campaigns. Conflicting potential solutions to these principal-agent problems generate two opposing expectations about campaigns’ preferences for ideological types of volunteers. Concerns about volunteers substituting their own ideological messages for the moderate and noncommittal ones campaigns prefer should make moderate volunteers more desirable; concerns about maximizing volunteer work-hours should lead to preferences for volunteers whose ideology matches the candidate’s. Using interviews with campaign operatives, a conjoint experiment, and a correspondence experiment, we show campaigns prefer volunteers whose views align with the candidate – interpreted by campaign operatives as a signal of likely enthusiasm and dedication – rather than moderate volunteers. However, even without resource constraints, these preferences are weak and fade in the presence of stronger indicators of commitment. They are absent in real-world volunteer recruitment. Overall, campaigns are more concerned with volunteers shirking responsibilities than they are with volunteers going off-message.

Duke Scholars

Author Jon Green Political Science