With election season in full swing, seemingly every neighborhood and busy intersection is sprouting dozens of multicolored signs touting candidates for offices ranging from register of wills to U.S. Senate.
Often, these signs proclaim a candidate’s name, but not much else. You might have wondered, how effective can they be as a campaign tool, especially in an age of radio, television and social media? Are they even a smart place to put campaign resources, particularly in local races, where funds are tight?
It turns out political scientists have tried to answer these questions.
A 2015 study led by Donald Green, a political science professor at Columbia University, found that political signs can in fact make a difference — “somewhere between 1 and 2 percentage points on average,” Green says. “Hardly earth shattering, but not nothing,…
