Would you put a sign in your yard for a campaign? After reading Politics on Display, you’ll find you will consider it more seriously. Todd Makse, Scott Minkoff, and Anand Sokhey’s profile of yard signs challenges our collective understanding of the role such signs play in how social and physical spaces become politicized. By collecting community-based empirical data and conducting statistical analyses to establish the relationship of yard signs to the local topography of sign usage, Politics on Display challenges the conventional wisdom that yard signs can be dismissed as a weak and outdated tool used by campaigns to marginally increase vote share. Instead, Makse, Minkoff, and Sokhey succeed in conceptualizing a new role for yard signs in the field of American political behavior by more fully capturing an American’s yard sign experience. Yard signs do more than increase a candidate’s vote share: they serve as a unique conduit to communicate neighborhood politics, values, and shared norms.

Capturing distinctive measurements across four elections and three municipalities, this book is unusual in its marriage of national survey data and three community studies. The research design is creative: for each community study in the text, complete data are collected on the presence (or absence) of yard signs for each household. Then, in two of the research sites, each household received a survey that asked not only about yard sign usage and experiences but also about local discussion networks. Finally, patterns of yard sign behavior in national surveys are compared to the behavior and responses observed in the research sites. The combination of careful community-based observational work, qualitative interviews, local case-based surveys, geographic data, and the evaluation of national survey data gives the reader a clear and comprehensive understanding of the extensive role that yard signs play in neighborhood politics.

Most of political science has not seriously considered the yard sign. Canonical texts on political behavior include actions such as voting, donating, volunteering, and protesting—but seldom include yard signs as a form of participation. Similarly, studies of persuasion focus on political conversation, but do not consider yard signs to be, as the authors argue, a coercive (neighbors cannot avoid seeing a sign) means of communication. Finally, studies of interpersonal networks have ignored yard signs entirely, especially in a local network context. Yard signs should be taken seriously: between 10–20% of Americans have displayed one over the past 30 years according to national surveys. People even care enough to steal yard signs (see map 1.1 in the text)! This book thus fills a void in the literature, documenting that yard signs follow conventional patterns of participation: people with more resources or more political interest are more likely to display them.

Yet, they are a different kind of political communication tool; more than 60% of both displayers and nondisplayers of yard signs report that they create feelings of divisiveness. In regression models using community-level data and surveys, shifting from a neighborhood with simply two more same-party signs compared to opposite-party signs results in a 10% decrease in anxiety. Further, people in larger and more agreeable networks are more likely to display a yard sign, and there is little evidence of “yard sign wars.” Yard signs politicize a local space. Moreover, the audience for them is primarily local: there is little evidence that the displayer intends to communicate to an audience outside of a neighborhood. These findings challenge our understanding of yard signs as a form of participation and instead locate them in a unique space as an act that is both participatory and communicative.

One challenge for this project is its observational nature. Because the authors cannot control the data-generation process for yard signs, one of the concerns when writing about their effects is that what appear to be yard sign effects are actually the result of campaigning. The book collects a significant body of evidence to challenge this, including evidence about the sources of yard signs; for example, more than one-third of all sign displayers report that they purchased their sign, and 22% report they procured their sign from a family member, friend, or neighbor. Variability in the local rate at which respondents reported being contacted by a campaign is also not associated with an increase in sign usage. The book maintains that sign display is an organic mode of political participation. Future work could extend this argument to document yard sign origins, patterns of use, and removal.

It is also important to note that this book does not attempt to measure the effect yard signs have on candidate messaging and turnout—indeed, prior randomized trials have established that signs do influence turnout—but instead to more broadly imagine how signs spread through a neighborhood, affect emotions, shift perceptions of neighbors, and establish patterns of social interaction. One of the critical contributions of this text is its ability to allow us to look at yard signs as a lens to understand the construction of a political neighborhood.

There is much more to investigate about the role of yard signs. Here are a handful of potential research questions that would allow future researchers to build on the Makse, Minkoff, and Sokhey’s text to extend our understanding of the influence of yard signs. These ideas would work best as community studies, benefiting from the ability to regularly observe or engage with a local community and following many of the best practices used in this book. First, how does the distribution of yard signs in a neighborhood change over the course of a campaign? Yard sign placement is a dynamic process: these authors document that yard signs are not placed as a consequence of canvassers (so there should be tremendous time variation). This book investigated early and late displayers, and we could learn a great deal from more granular data. How do yard signs spread? Second, if it were possible to partner with a campaign, a researcher could track the spread of specific yard signs via QR codes. Who picks up a sign but gives it to a friend? Twenty-two percent of respondents report getting a sign from a friend: What does that network look like? Third, if a campaign partnership was possible, researchers could conduct a randomized trial to study who agrees to put a yard sign out, blocking based on neighborhood composition. Are yard sign adopters more likely to comply in homogeneous or heterogeneous neighborhoods? Finally, it would be interesting to conduct a survey after an election to see if respondents were able to (1) recall whether their neighbors put up a yard sign and (2) if the presence of yard signs was associated with accurately assessing neighbors’ party identification (via a voter file).

This book will likely become a staple of graduate education in American politics. Across modes of inquiry, it is thoughtful, careful, and exceptionally creative. It challenges all of us to reconsider what we can learn from the presence and absence of yard signs in understanding the ways in which politics integrate into neighborhoods. Yard sign data can be used to better understand how social and physical spaces become politicized.