Racial and Partisan Social Information Prompts Campaign Giving: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Electoral campaigns are increasingly reliant on small donations from individual donors. In this work, we examine the influence of racial and partisan social descriptive norms on donation behavior using a randomized field experiment. We find that partisan identity information treatments significantly increase donation behavior, while racial identity information has only small and insignificant effect compared to the control. We find, however, significant variation by racial status. For minorities, information about the behavior of other donors in their racial group is as powerful or more powerful than information about co-partisan behavior, while white respondents are much more responsive to information about co-partisan behavior than to information about co-racial behavior. Our results show that partisan and racial identity based social normative information can have a strong effect on actual donation behaviors and how these normative motivations vary across racial groups.