What is it about?
In the 2020 U.S. federal election, some political campaigns added a pre-checked checkbox to their donation websites. If the boxes were left checked, donors' donations would repeat every week. These checkboxes, or "weekly defaults", were often obfuscated by paragraphs of text, making them hard to notice. This paper measures how much money campaigns gained by using these weekly defaults, whether donors set up chains of recurring donations by accident, and who was most affected.
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Why is it important?
As political campaigns increasingly rely on small-dollar donations, they have started using deceptive tactics to try to get donors to give more money. Our paper documents political campaigns that did this in the 2020 U.S. federal election (see figure below). It then quantifies the impact of these tactics on the campaigns' finances -- campaigns that used weekly defaults gained an additional $43 million -- an 11% increase in donation income. Finally, the paper shows that the weekly default caused donors to refund weekly donations but not other donations, indicating that the weekly default may have caused donors to give by accident. These findings can inform policy discussions regarding the use of defaults by political campaigns and companies more generally.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Dark defaults: How choice architecture steers political campaign donations, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2218385120.
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