Political yard signs: bottom-up, grass-roots activism

Nearly half of those surveyed believe the grass-roots displays can influence an election

By Clay Evans

Oh, the things a political scientist will do to learn more about the behavior of the American political animal.

Take Assistant Professors Anand Sokhey of the University of Colorado Boulder and Todd Makse of Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. Intrigued by what drives people to put up yard signs during political campaigns, they were willing to drive hundreds of miles in selected precincts of Columbus, Ohio, to find out.



“We actually drove these precincts, street by street and marked houses where there were yard signs on a map. Much the same as Google drives the streets, but we were doing it with just two people, a laptop and a lot of coffee,” Sokhey says.

Then they matched the maps with publicly available data such as voter records and property information, and conducted surveys with voters who posted yard signs.

While those who don’t plant political signs may not understand it, they found that those who do are engaged in real, meaningful political activity.

Putting up a yard sign may seem a relatively lightweight contribution to political debate among those who eschew such demonstrations. But Sokhey and Makse found that 46 percent of survey respondents believe that yard signs can influence an election.“Despite the ubiquity of yard signs, little is known about how and why individuals display them,” they wrote in a recent paper in the journal Political Behavior. “Our findings suggest that the dissemination of yard signs is not merely a top-down process driven by campaign professionals, but a genuine participatory act … fueled by individual initiative and social networking.”

Some of the findings, Sokhey acknowledges, are not exactly surprising. For example, those with stronger partisan views in any given race are more likely to plant a yard sign. In addition, people living on streets with higher traffic volume are more likely to place a sign.

But the researchers also found that individuals are more likely to put up a sign if their neighbors agree with their political sentiments than if they disagree.

“Some individuals … such as long-time residents in engaged, homogeneous networks, actively contribute to the escalation of ‘sign wars’ by distributing signs to others,” the researchers write.

Putting up a yard sign may seem a relatively lightweight contribution to political debate among those who eschew such demonstrations. But Sokhey and Makse found that 46 percent of survey respondents believe that yard signs can influence an election.

Yard signs are more than a source of political information, the researchers say. They are truly a form of participation through which “individuals shape their political context as much as they are shaped by it.”

“We tend to think that a yard sign doesn’t matter that much. But we can’t think of these as simple or meaningless acts,” Sokhey says. “People who take time to do this kind of thing have real reasons that involve everything from letting others know where they stand, to showing pride in their candidate, to catching the eye of passing traffic.”

Clay Evans is director of public relations for CU Presents.

June 25, 2014