Engaging in political activity and the free rider problem

This past week, I spent some time volunteering for a local political campaign in Charlottesville. It strikes me that the efforts of anyone volunteering for a political campaign may in fact have positive externalities, a perspective I hadn’t yet considered. Assuming one is volunteering for a candidate who supports policies that are socially optimal – or at least more socially beneficial than those of their opponents (very big assumptions, to be sure) – a volunteer’s work on behalf of a campaign can create benefits for society. As a volunteer puts in more work, they may sway more voters, and increase the likelihood that their candidate gets elected. The benefit from each additional hour of of unpaid work from a volunteer is shared by all of a candidate’s constituents who benefit from the policies they might implement once elected. In other words, that extra hour of work has a greater social benefit than the private benefit which the volunteer alone receives by volunteering.

An implication of this is that volunteering on political campaigns will be underproduced, because many people would have an incentive to “free ride,” benefitting from the volunteer work of others who help elect the preferred candidate. Of course, this implication comes from assumptions in an ideal world: the assumption that one candidate has consistently socially optimal policies; the assumption that those policies benefit a large proportion of their constituents; the assumption that more volunteer hours consumed leads to a higher likelihood of the candidate winning; and the assumption of perfect information availability about the impacts of a candidate’s policies. In the real world, many of these assumptions don’t hold, and individuals’ policy preferences are highly subjective. This is the difficulty with social benefits and costs: they are very difficult to measure and to account for differences.