🚀 Messages emphasizing party ideology and potential candidacy were particularly effective, increasing the recruitment rate by 18-33%. In contrast, highlighting specific policy priorities reduced recruitment.

👩‍🎤 Highlighting gender inclusiveness significantly boosted female and marginalized community participation. Strategies signaling inclusiveness had lasting, though mixed, impacts up to 3 years later!

📈Specific strategies not only increased the number of recruits but also enhanced their diversity in gender, ethnicity, education, and political skills.

Contrary to beliefs party leaders will be stuck with few and poor-quality volunteers, our findings show that elite efforts via signaling various aspects of joining the party can indeed shape the rank and file in meaningful ways.

The party randomized recruitment messages to 1% of a 13-million-person electorate to join its ranks during its routine volunteer recruitment in the state.

Can party leaders influence the quality and quantity of these volunteers (as previous work shows they can with prized candidate nominations)? We analyze a field experiment by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Jharkhand, India to find out.

Recruiting a large number of ground workers is crucial for modern election campaigns, but there is a dearth of evidence on how party leaders confront the large human resource management work of recruiting the rank and file before campaigns can actually be run.

🚨 Just published in American Political Science Review 🚨 with Durgesh Pathak @sarahthompson.bsky.social and Aliz Toth We show that strategic messaging by party leaders can effectively shape volunteer rank&file recruitment with consequences for long-term party development

Thank you! That's really interesting! do you have a reference for this argument?

Thank you :)