Political Yard Signs: What’s the Point?
As I drove to my son’s Little League game in a predominantly Republican area of town, I encountered a barrage of political yard signs. I found myself wondering how they work: What is the mechanism of action — the series of downstream effects — that supposedly lead from “I plant a sign in my yard” to “my candidate wins”?
There’s a bit of research from way back in 1979 that lands on the not-so-hard-hitting correlational conclusion that “Candidates with the greatest number of signs received the greatest number of votes in six of the seven races.”
Lending credence to the claim that yard signs actually matter, state laws dictate the minimum distance yard signs can be posted from the entrance to polling stations. These regulations are in part due to a belief that electioneering influences voter behavior.
Experimental research published in 2016 suggests otherwise. Donald Green and colleagues assigned princints to different experimental signage conditions (roughly: “plant a lot of signs” vs “not”). The results were underwhelming.
The authors write, “It appears that signs on average raise vote shares by just over one percentage point.” Compiling across four independent studies, they suggested the effect is “probably greater than zero but unlikely to be large enough to alter the outcome of a contest that would otherwise be decided by more than a few percentage points.”
But, perhaps winning the election isn’t really the point of yard signs. Afterall, stories abound about their personal, if not statistical, significance.
A farmer in Nebraska received a call earlier this month saying his farm equipment — roughly 1.5 million dollars worth — was on fire. Why? Possibly because he had two pro-Trump flags tied to the combine.
James McConnaughey, an engineer in Northern Virginia, observed that two families on his street in suburbia protect their campaign signs by putting them “in metal cages that are cable locked to trees.”
A quick internet search for “campaign signs vandalized” returns no shortage of signs being stolen, set ablaze, or otherwise defaced — and there are plenty of examples from across the political spectrum.
What is it about a piece of cardboard on a stick that triggers such intense reaction?
The field experiment authors suggest that yard signs “represent an impersonal mode of campaign communication.” The fact that people set signs and other property ablaze, incur great personal expense to customize their buildings and vehicles to advocate for specific candidates, and otherwise invest a lot of time and attention in protecting their yard signs, suggests they are anything but impersonal.
So why do we put up yard signs?
For one, they communicate who belongs in our communities. As an attorney in Maryland explained, “We live in a conservative rural area and are a two-mom family with a child…We always fly the Pride flag, which we decided was necessary after the Pulse massacre — we refused to silently exist anymore.” In other words, their flag and accompanying yard signs say, “We belong.”
Yard signs also communicate “You belong.” Deborah Vinall, a psychotherapist in California’s Inland Empire added, “These values are important to me, as is showing my minority neighbors that they are welcome.”
Next, there’s a sense that yard signs send a lot of love to candidates in local races, increasing awareness that a candidate is running. A city commissioner in California suggested that’s exactly how it works. She notes, “We know that name recognition makes a big difference in who people will vote for if they haven’t done a ton of research on a particular race on their own. So for small local elections, especially, getting a person’s name into enough people’s consciousness seems important as a prerequisite to them being competitive in an election.” Indeed, the mere exposure effect does suggest that familiarity breeds liking.
A frequent response to queries about why people choose to plant yard signs is this: I have to do something. This sentiment may be in response to this particularly polarized season in our nation’s history. Said a psychology professor in Pennsylvania, “Signs are the least we can do.”
A politically active single mom of two in Queens added, “I have them up this year. I’ve also bought them and given them to people in more prominent geographic locations. Reason: because I feel like I didn’t do enough last cycle, so this cycle, I’m doing everything from money to postcards to texts to signs. I don’t want to look back and wonder if there was any more I could have done.”
A bit later, suggesting what may be behind many of the yard signs on display from California to the New York island, “It was my way of publicly proclaiming allegiance.”
Decades of social psychological research shows that even completely arbitrary markers of “us” vs “them” — like who was randomly assigned to wear a green t-shirt vs. a yellow t-shirt upon entering the lab — leads to ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation. Yard signs, of course, are not distributed by random assignment in a research lab. They tell passersby to which tribe you belong. And, for better or worse, these passersby will fill in a lot of missing knowledge about you with what they believe to be true of people of your ilk.
Of course, not everyone posts yard signs. A realtor in Staten Island points out, “If I were to put my political affiliation on my lawn, it would be an essay not a sign.” A Seattle-area physician who regularly proclaims strong opinions on everything from the spices in his cabinet to the wardrobes of professional wrestlers, draws a line at sharing his political opinions via yard signs. He said:
“I don’t have a sign. I don’t explicitly know the voting preferences of my neighbors, although I can guess. I have nice relationships with my neighbors — we are neighborly…I’d get concerned that if our relationships became political, it would adversely impact the neighborly aspect.”
Data from the Pew Research Center suggests he’s right. Roughly 30% of both liberals and conservatives alike say it would be harder to get along with a new neighbor from the other political party.
Indeed, neighborhood divisions over yard signs — and the ideologies they represent — are real. An educator in California whose family moved just three years ago into their dream home in what they thought was their dream neighborhood knows what’s at stake:
“Picture two obsessed Trumpers with multiple flags and signs, with spotlights on their signs. A Muslim family living between them who have a teenager who made handmade signs for justice and Black Lives Matter. Our home has a sign asking for tolerance and kindness and to wear masks and also vote for a particular candidate for school board. Another neighbor with Biden signs and social justice signs. And then the family with a son married to his husband. An interracial family and a Latinx family. All on a culdesac of nine homes. It is every bit as divided as it sounds. And because of COVID we are all here 24/7. Now, we hope to move in January 2021. We are house poor and it just is not worth it to be so financially stretched and have such tension. We’re out.”
Stories like this make me wonder if the political theater of yard signs costs our communities more than they help. But then, a psychology professor in Iowa shared a wonderful story of unexpected connection spurred by a Black Lives Matter sign she posted in her yard:
“The day after I posted my BLM yard sign, a guy knocked on my front door. He was White, wearing overalls, smoking, and had parked a pickup truck on my street. I immediately worried about getting into a confrontation. It turned out he wanted to know where he could get one for his own yard.”
Perhaps that which divides can also connect.
