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Differential Effects of Personal Contact Campaigning

A core element of the contemporary debate over participation inequality concerns the effect of mobilizing institutions, such as political parties and campaign organizations, on those inequalities. The conventional position is that biased mobilization politics increases participation inequality by stimulating greater participation by the mobilized (of high SES), compared to the not-mobilized (of low SES). Evidence of participation inequality and bias in mobilization, however, is not usually accompanied by direct evidence that mobilization efforts exacerbate those inequalities. I address these concerns by assessing whether mobilization effects are unequal across SES strata, developing an argument about differential campaign effects and analyzing SES-based differences in campaign effects. The analysis uses NES panel studies to control for the campaign contacts’ endogeneity. The results show that personal campaign contact mobilization effects decrease significantly in strength as respondents’ socioeconomic status increases. Thus, participation inequalities are actually reduced via personal campaign contacts by dint of their greater effects on low-SES Americans.