If you drive around Charlottesville during election season, you'll see a bevy of political campaign lawn signs posted in the yards of city residents. Forty years ago, this might not have been the case -- according to one study, use of lawn signs quadrupled between 1984 and 2012. According to the Washington Post, this is because campaign managers like to feel as if they're making an impact, and political candidates like to feel like they're winning. Regardless of this small consumption externality of an ego boost, how much do lawn signs actually increase your chance of winning an election?
Again via the Washington post, the positive impact of lawn signs is negligible -- an average increase of 1.7 percentage points, with a standard error of 0.7 percentage points. How much money do campaigns waste every year on a purchasing practice that is probably only impactful in extremely close races?
There's another possible impact of lawn signs that campaign managers may have failed to consider. Lawn signs give people the impression that everyone's voting -- in a town like Charlottesville, they even give the impression that everyone's voting for the same candidate. This could easily leave voters with the impression that (a) this is not a close election, and (b) there is a large portion of the population voting. Both of these factors will decrease p, the probability that an individual's vote will be the deciding vote in the election, thereby decreasing the expected value of voting and decreasing the chance they'll take the time to vote at all. From the perspective of the campaign manager, if this effect is larger than the increase of votes from distributing lawn signs, distributing lawn signs could actually hurt your candidate's chances of winning. The more lawn signs you post, the more you increase the chance that someone will participate in rational abstention come election time.
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