CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Riggs, Tara Simone |
|---|---|
| Title | Using Experimental Design to Test the Effect of Campaign Donation Knowledge on Interpersonal Political Trust in the United States |
| Summary | While the link between knowledge of a candidate and evaluations of said, candidate is well established, little research has examined how knowledge of “outside donations” effect the way that candidates are evaluated. The combined effects of campaign finance and political knowledge on interpersonal political trust are studied in a survey experiment (n=153) measuring how the introduction of knowledge of the source of a candidate’s campaign funding changes perception of trust and evaluations of the candidate. Previous literature on political trust has focused on trust in institutions or the belief that one can affect change in politics, but this research examines how voters trust politicians as actors rather than as institutions. This experiment finds knowledge of outside funding has a significant impact on candidate evaluations and the likelihood of a respondent to vote for a candidate. Respondents in the treatment group demonstrated lower levels of trust in the candidate as well as lower probabilities of voting for the candidate in a statistically significant manner, but also demonstrated evidence that theoretical negative feelings toward outside donations are partially mitigated by introducing a human aspect - and assigning a large percentage of donations from outside sources to a previously neutral or positively evaluated candidate. |
| Supervisor | Littvay, Levente |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/riggs_tara.pdf |
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