[EL] Empirical studies of disclosure

[Jim Gardner]

You might possibly find a piece of mine to contain relevant analysis.  Part III deals with the empirical studies.  The piece is here:

http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1584&context=wmborj

and the abstract is below.

Jim


ANONYMITY AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP


James A. Gardner
University at Buffalo Law School
State University of New York


Many aspects of modern democratic life are or can be performed anonymously – voting, financial contributions, petition signing, political speech and debate, communication with and lobbying of officials, and so forth.  But is it desirable for citizens to perform such tasks anonymously?  Anonymity frees people from social pressures associated with observation and identifiability, but does this freedom produce behavior that is democratically beneficial?  What, in short, is the effect of anonymity on the behavior of democratic citizens, and how should we evaluate it?

In this paper, I attempt a first pass answer to these questions by turning to both democratic theory and empirical research.  Democratic theory provides a baseline account of the qualities that citizens of a democracy ideally ought to possess.  Here I focus on three: sincerity in political expression and action; independence in the formulation and expression of political beliefs; and public-mindedness in outlook.  The question, then, is whether anonymity helps or hinders citizens in developing these qualities.  To answer it, I turn to the empirical work.  To date, very little research targets the impact of anonymity on overtly political behavior, so it is necessary to resort to more general research on the effect of anonymity on behavior in other realms.  What these studies tend repeatedly to show is that the effect of anonymity on behavior is highly variable and context-dependent.  Anonymity tends to reduce inhibitions, but the kind of behavior that results from reduced inhibition depends on a host of contextual factors: the predispositions of the individual in question, the norms of groups to which the individual belongs that are made salient by the specific behavior in question, the nature of the decision to be made, and the immediate context of decision making.  

To the extent these results apply to political behavior, it is probably impossible to assert as a blanket proposition that anonymity in political speech, financial contributions, petition signing, communication with officials, or any other activity will either enhance or undermine the sincerity, independence, and public-mindedness with which citizens behave.  More likely is that anonymity will have such an effect for some people in some circumstances but not for others.  The paper concludes with a brief consideration of some of the common contextual factors in which contemporary democratic politics occurs, including the infrequency of hard coercion, the general pluralism of American political belief, the ubiquity of “soft” forms of coercion imposed by social networks, and the inevitability of framing and priming effects.





___________________________
James A. Gardner
Bridget and Thomas Black SUNY Distinguished Professor
SUNY Buffalo Law School
The State University of New York
Room 514, O'Brian Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260-1100
voice: 716-645-3607
fax: 716-645-2064
e-mail: jgard at buffalo.edu
www.law.buffalo.edu
Papers at http://ssrn.com/author=40126



From: Gilbert, Michael (mg5cm) 
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2013 11:22 AM
To: law-election at UCI.edu 
Subject: [EL] Empirical studies of disclosure

Dear colleagues,

The Supreme Court and many others claim (sensibly enough, it would seem) that mandatory disclosure combats corruption and the appearance of corruption. I am looking for any and all empirical studies that directly test or otherwise bear on this hypothesis. I would be glad to take responses off-line.

Thank you, and best wishes,

Mike Gilbert


Michael D. Gilbert
Associate Professor 
University of Virginia School of Law
(434) 243-8551
mg5cm at virginia.edu


View my research:  http://ssrn.com/author=1304972







--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Law-election mailing list
Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20130815/2cfffd1f/attachment.html>