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Replication Data for: Following the Money? How Donor Information Affects Public Opinion about Initiatives

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Following the Money? How Donor Information Affects Public Opinion about Initiatives
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DAVN13
 
Creator Boudreau, Cheryl
MacKenzie, Scott
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description 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 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.
 
Subject Social Sciences
 
Contributor MacKenzie, Scott