The Professor Will See You Now: Coyness in political research
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
4 min read
Lessons in political science. This week: coyness in political research
Let’s call it The Case of The Unknown Political Party. It’s a fascinating new study, in which academics worked with an unnamed British political party during the 2019 election to measure the effect that different types of fundraising emails had. The study found that appeals using negative messaging led to a higher number and frequency of donations if they were paired with an issue identity – in this case, Brexit – rather than a party cue. In other words, if you want to raise cash, go negative and don’t big up your party.
The particular party is not named; the authors claim that the confidentiality agreement they signed means they can’t identify who they paired up with. Yet it does not require Perry Mason to solve this one. Which British political party in 2019 was sending out fundraising emails – using a bright gold ‘Donate Here’ button – saying “we all want to stop Brexit”? It’s a complete mystery.
Our second case is a paper in the British Journal of Political Science, which looked at what motivated activists to go campaigning. In two separate field experiments, party members were randomly told that canvassing was good for mobilising voters or that it would enhance their own political careers. Neither made them more likely to get out and knock on doors. The authors conclude that instrumental considerations like this have almost no effect on political activism, which is probably better seen as an expressive act.
A related study, published a couple of years ago in The Economic Journal, found that telling activists that their colleagues are more active campaigners than they had previously realised can significantly reduce the amount of canvassing people do.
This piece of research doesn’t even identify which country it was from, just that it involved “a large European party”. Given the identity of the authors and some clues scattered throughout the paper – a system that uses majoritarian single-member districts as well as proportional party lists – my little grey cells tell me it’s Germany, but your guess as to what party is as good as mine.
None of these studies would have been possible without the involvement of the parties. They allowed researchers access to valuable data about fundraising or canvassing; rather than having to rely on activists’ recall of their behaviour (“yeah, yeah, I’ve been out every night, great reception on the doorstep”), they could instead use data from the party’s canvassing app (“Has not left the sofa”). In return, presumably the party got first dibs on useful analysis of that data.
So, kudos to both sets of academics, because you can imagine the tortuous negotiations that must have been involved, even if the result is that both are then so coy about who they partnered up with.
The coyness does matter, I think, if only because it limits how much we can generalise from the findings. To take the British case as an example, the authors argue that issue-based appeals are more successful than party ones, negative ones more useful than positive ones. But what the research actually shows is that, in this particular case, at that particular moment in time, an issue-based appeal to Liberal Democrats members of this completely unknown political party was successful. Maybe it would work differently with people from different political parties? And maybe the appeal to wider causes worked with Brexit, which was pretty sui generis as an issue; maybe it wouldn’t work with other issues. Ditto for the other study. Maybe German canvassers are expressive; Brits might be more instrumental.
This isn’t to criticise any of the research. It’s to say we need more like it, but ideally involving fewer whodunits.
Further reading: A Hager et al, Political Activists are Not Driven by Instrumental Motives: Evidence from Two Natural Field Experiments, British Journal of Political Science (2025); K Lawall et al, Negative Political Identities and Costly Political Action, The Journal of Politics (2025); A Hager et al, Political Activists as Free Riders: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment, The Economic Journal (2023)
