Follower effect

The follow-up effect , also known as the bandwagon effect , describes in action theory the effect that a perceived success has on the willingness to join the likely successful modes of action. For example, voters would like to be on the winning side; that is, they are more likely to choose the candidates they expect to be victorious.

This action-determining effect is found not only in the field of election and media impact research, but also in the field of consumer research. Formal representations were introduced to microeconomics as well as game theory .

In English, the bandwagon is the car of a music band ; bandwagon means musicians wagon or festival wagon with a band . This band wagon is accompanied by followers on foot. That is why the bandwagon effect is the follower effect or imitation .

Concept history

The follower effect became known through “ The People's Choice ”, a groundbreaking panel study by Paul F. Lazarsfeld et al. on the 1940 presidential campaign in Erie County , Ohio .

It was already described in Germany in 1932 by Carlo Mierendorff, then SPD member of the Reichstag, as a “political herd instinct” and in 1940 by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in her dissertation on political mass surveys in the USA as a “band wagon impuls”. This action-regulating effect shows how voter behavior is influenced by the publication of election forecasts ( spiral of silence ).

Political sociology also speaks of the “follower effect” when people join a party or social movement for personal advantages or to avoid disadvantages (for example, after 1933, the NSDAP ).

In microeconomics, there is also talk of the follower effect (also known as the imitation effect). This effect describes the increase in the demand for a consumer good due to the fact that other consumers (members of a reference group) have bought this good (often they are fashionable items). The demand then increases to a greater extent than would be the case with a normal course of demand.

In sport, there is also talk of the follower effect when people stick to a club that supposedly ends the season successfully. If the sporting success is lacking or diminishing, another club can be favored at short notice. In German football, for example, fans of FC Bayern Munich often speak of “success fans ”, as it has been by far the most successful football club in Germany for several decades and has a large following all over Germany.

Lazarsfeld's The People's Choice

Lazarsfeld's Bandwagon Effect describes the interaction between a person's expectations of who will win an election ( anticipation of the winner ) with their vote intention and their political interest. There is a high correlation between voting intention and expectation of winners. Every party supporter expects their candidate to win; But if you are not interested, you will not have a firm opinion about who will win. The expectation of a winner depends more on direct social contacts than the voting intention. That a bandwagon effect actually works can be inferred from the fact that undecided voters later decide to vote for the candidate who they previously expected to win. From a psychological point of view, the psychological interplay between expectation and intention to choose is a rather complex process. Presumably, even unclear intentions are initially formulated as expectations about the winner.

Follow-up effect through forecast announcement

If, in the course of an election, initial predictions of voter behavior are made available to the public, some voters will no longer cast their votes to the preferred candidate, but to the supposed winner of this election, and voters who are still undecided follow the crowd and also give their votes to the predicted winner Voice.

Mark Granovetter justifies Lazarsfeld's follow-up effect with a rational benefit analysis. The individuals assess the negative follow-up costs of a decision and their own security or assertiveness and correlate them with the number of those who make the same decision. The difference in individual personality becomes clear. For every person there is a specific threshold for the participation of others, above which they give in to their preferences and consider the situation to be safe enough to be able to choose it as well. Instead of a rational benefit analysis, you can also set other individual considerations at this point, for example moral, character or social aspects. The only important thing is the assumption that there is a threshold value that can be given as a percentage that is present to the individual. It can be 0% or 100%, but a value in between is also conceivable. If the threshold of a player is 0%, it can be said that his decision is fully in line with his preferences and he always makes use of this decision, regardless of how other players act. A threshold value of 100%, on the other hand, suggests that the individual only decides to make a decision as soon as all other players choose exactly this.

If the threshold value is between these two values, the individual considerations come into play. In dynamic games this change in the equilibrium is demonstrated by economists and statisticians with the help of newer mathematical methods such as the theory of stochastic approximation.

Empirical studies of the follow-up effect make use of the western voting phenomenon.

literature

• Avinash Kamalakar Dixit , Barry J. Nalebuff: Game Theory for Beginners - Strategic Know-How for Winners . Schäffer-Poeschel, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 978-3-7910-1239-1 .
• Raymund Werle (Hrsg.): Social complexity and collective agency . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 2000, ISBN 3-593-36470-0 . In particular p. 83ff.
• Timur Kuran: Living in a lie - distortion of preferences and their social consequences . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1997, ISBN 3-16-146424-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ "Mitlaufereffekt", in: Wolfgang J. Koschnik, standard dictionary for the social sciences , Vol. 2, Munich London New York Paris 1993, ISBN 3-598-11080-4 .
2. ↑ Harvey Leibenstein : Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumers' Demand , The Quarterly Journal of Economics (May 1950); see also: Harvey Leibenstein: Beyond Economic Man: A New Foundation for Microeconomics. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass. 1976. Cf. Dirk Piekenbrock: "Demand interdependence"
3. ^ Paul F. Lazarsfeld , Bernard Berelson, Hazel Gaudet: The People's Choice. How the Voter makes up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 3. Edition. Columbia University Press, New York, London 1968 (first: 1944).
4. ↑ "The Full Truth"; in: Sozialistische Monatshefte, 38 [1932] 5, pp. 297–304
5. ↑ American mass surveys on politics and the press […] Limburg / Lahn 1940; Frankfurt / M. 1940 (= Zeitung and Zeit, NF, Series A, Volume 16, 166 pages and appendices)
6. ^ Rudolf Heberle : Social Movements. An Introduction to Political Sociology. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York 1951. pp. 98f., P. 110.
7. ^ W. Theiler: Fundamentals of Economics: Microeconomics. Munich 2011, pp. 140ff, ISBN 978 3 8252 8454 1 .
8. ^ Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, Hazel Gaudet: The People's Choice. How the Voter makes up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 3rd edition Columbia University Press New York London 1968 (first: 1944). P. 106.
9. ^ Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, Hazel Gaudet: The People's Choice. How the Voter makes up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 3rd edition Columbia University Press New York London 1968 (first: 1944). P. 107ff.
10. ↑ Granovetter, M. 1978: Threshold models of collective behavior. American Journal of Sociology 83: 1420-1443 (1978). Cf. Volker Müller-Benedict: Chaos and Self-Organization: New Theoretical Approaches in the Social Sciences. ( PDF ; 7.4 MB) (No longer available online.) In: HSR-Transition. 1996, archived from the original on May 30, 2009 ; Retrieved December 5, 2008 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
11. ↑ A. Dixit, B. J. Nalebuff: Game theory for beginners . S. 228 (see literature ↑ ).