The bandwagon effect, also known as the "cromo effect" and closely related to opportunism, is a phenomenon—observed primarily within the fields of microeconomics Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies how the individual parts of the economy, the household and the firms, make decisions to allocate limited resources, typically in markets where goods or services are being bought and sold. Microeconomics examines how these decisions and behaviours affect the supply and demand for goods and, political science Political science is a social science concerned with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. Political scientists "see themselves engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions. And from these revelations they attempt to construct, and behaviorism Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior), is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors. The behaviorist school of thought maintains that behaviors as such can be—that people often do and believe things merely because many other people do and believe the same things. The effect is often called herd instinct Herd behavior describes how individuals in a group can act together without planned direction. The term pertains to the behavior of animals in herds, flocks, and schools, and to human conduct during activities such as stock market bubbles and crashes, street demonstrations, sporting events, religious gatherings, episodes of mob violence and even, though strictly speaking this effect is a result of herd instinct. The bandwagon effect is the reason for the bandwagon fallacy This type of argument is known by several names, including appeal to the masses, appeal to belief, appeal to the majority, appeal to the people, argument by consensus, authority of the many, and bandwagon fallacy, and in Latin by the names argumentum ad populum , argumentum ad numerum ("appeal to the number"), and consensus gentium (&'s success.

The bandwagon effect is well-documented in behavioral psychology and has many applications. The general rule is that conduct or beliefs spread among people, as fads and trends A trend is a line of general direction of movement, a line of development, a prevailing tendency or inclination, an emerging style or preference, or the general movement over time of a statistically detectable change. In short, "trend" is a synonym of "tendency" clearly do, with "the probability of any individual adopting it increasing with the proportion who have already done so".^[1] As more people come to believe in something, others also "hop on the bandwagon" regardless of the underlying evidence. The tendency to follow the actions or beliefs of others can occur because individuals directly prefer to conform, or because individuals derive information from others. Both explanations have been used for evidence of conformity in psychological experiments. For example, social pressure has been used to explain Asch's conformity experiments^[2], and information has been used to explain Sherif's autokinetic experiment.^[3]

When individuals make rational choices based on the information they receive from others, economists have proposed that information cascades An information cascade occurs when people observe the actions of others and then make the same choice that the others have made, independently of their own private information signals. Because it is usually sensible to do what other people are doing, the phenomenon is assumed to be the result of rational choice. Nevertheless, information cascades can quickly form in which people decide to ignore their personal information signals and follow the behavior of others.^[4] Cascades explain why behavior is fragile—people understand that they are based on very limited information. As a result, fads form easily but are also easily dislodged. Such informational effects have been used to explain political bandwagons.^[5]

Origin of the phrase

Literally, a bandwagon is a wagon which carries the band in a parade, circus or other entertainment.^[6] The phrase "jump on the bandwagon" first appeared in American politics in 1848 when Dan Rice Dan Rice , was an American entertainer of many talents, most famously as a clown, who was pre-eminent before the American Civil War. During the height of his career, Rice was a household name. Coining the terms "One Horse Show" and "Greatest Show", he was a leading personality in the new American "pop culture",, a famous and popular circus clown of the time, used his bandwagon and its music to gain attention for campaign appearances. As campaigns became more successful, more politicians strove for a seat on the bandwagon, hoping to be associated with the success. Later, during the time of William Jennings Bryan William Jennings Bryan was an American politician in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. He was a dominant force in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, standing three times as its candidate for President of the United States (1896, 1900 and 1908). He served in Congress briefly as a representative from Nebraska and was the 41st United's 1900 presidential campaign, bandwagons had become standard in campaigns,^[7] and "jump on the bandwagon" was used as a derogatory term, implying that people were associating themselves with the success without considering what they associated themselves with.

Use in politics

The bandwagon effect occurs in voting: some people vote for those candidates or parties who are likely to succeed (or are proclaimed as such by the media), hoping to be on the 'winner's side' in the end.^[8] The Bandwagon effect has been applied to situations involving majority opinion, such as political outcomes, where people alter their opinions to the majority view (McAllister and Studlar 721). Such a shift in opinion can occur because individuals draw inferences from the decisions of others, as in an informational cascade An information cascade occurs when people observe the actions of others and then make the same choice that the others have made, independently of their own private information signals. Because it is usually sensible to do what other people are doing, the phenomenon is assumed to be the result of rational choice. Nevertheless, information cascades.

Because of time zones, election results are broadcast in the eastern parts of the United States while polls are still open in the west. This difference has led to research on how the behavior of voters in western United States are influenced by news about the decisions of voters in other time zones. In 1980, NBC News NBC News is the news division of American television network NBC. Its current president is Steve Capus declared Ronald Reagan Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States (1981–1989) and the 33rd Governor of California (1967–1975). Born in Tampico, Illinois, Reagan moved to Los Angeles, California in 1937. He began a career as an actor, first in films and later television, appearing in 52 movie productions and gaining enough success to become a to be the winner of the presidential race on the basis of the exit polls several hours before the voting booths closed in the west.

It is also said to be important in the American Presidential Primary elections. States all vote at different times, spread over some months, rather than all on one day, some states (Iowa, New Hampshire) have special precedence to go early while others have to wait until a certain date. This is often said to give undue influence to these states, a win in these early states is said to give a Candidate the "Big Mo" (momentum) and has propelled many candidates to win the nomination. Because of this, other states often try front loading (going as early as possible) to make their say as influential as they can. In the 2008 presidential primaries two states had all or some of their delegates banned from the convention by the central party organizations for voting too early.^[9][10]

Several studies have tested this theory of the bandwagon effect in political decision making. In the 1994 study of Robert K. Goidel and Todd G. Shields in The Journal of Politics The Journal of Politics is a leading peer-reviewed international general journal of political science founded in 1939 and published quarterly by Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association. It is usually abbreviated as "JoP." The journal can be accessed online via Blackwell Synergy (older volumes before 20, 180 students at the University of Kentucky were randomly assigned to nine groups and were asked questions about the same set of election scenarios. About 70% of subjects received information about the expected winner (Goidel and Shields 807). Independents, which are those who do not vote based on the endorsement of any party and are ultimately neutral, were influenced strongly in favor of the person expected to win (Goidel and Shields 807-808). Expectations played a significant role throughout the study. It was found that independents are twice as likely to vote for the Republican candidate when the Republican is expected to win. From the results, it was also found that when the Democrat was expected to win, independent Republicans and weak Republicans were more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate (Goidel and Shields 808).

A study by Albert Mehrabian, reported in The Journal of Applied Social Psychology (1998), tested the relative importance of the bandwagon (rally around the winner) effect versus the underdog An underdog is a person or group in a competition, frequently in electoral politics, sports and creative works, who is popularly expected to lose. The party, team or individual expected to win is called the favourite or top dog. In the rare case where an underdog wins, the outcome is an upset. These terms are commonly used in sports betting.[ (empathic support for those trailing) effect. Bogus poll results presented to voters prior to the 1996 Republican primary clearly showed the bandwagon effect to predominate on balance. Indeed, approximately 6% of the variance in the vote was explained in terms of the bogus polls, showing that poll results (whether accurate or inaccurate) can significantly influence election results in closely-contested elections. In particular, assuming that one candidate "is an initial favorite by a slim margin, reports of polls showing that candidate as the leader in the race will increase his or her favorable margin" (Mehrabian, 1998, p. 2128). Thus, as poll results are repeatedly reported, the bandwagon effect will tend to snowball and become a powerful aid to leading candidates.

During the 1992 U.S. presidential election, Vicki G. Morwitz and Carol Pluzinski conducted a study, which was published in The Journal of Consumer Research. At a large northeastern university, some of 214 volunteer business students were given the results of student and national polls indicating that Bill Clinton William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. At 46 he was the third-youngest president. He became president at the end of the Cold War, and was the first baby boomer president. His wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is currently the United States Secretary of State. Each received a Juris was in the lead. Others were not exposed to the results of the polls. Several students who had intended to vote for Bush changed their minds after seeing the poll results (Morwitz and Pluzinski 58-64).

Internationally, British polls have shown an increase to public exposure. Sixty-eight percent of voters had heard of the general election campaign results of the opinion poll in 1979. In 1987, this number of voters aware of the results increased to 74% (McAllister and Studlar 725). According to British studies, there is a consistent pattern of apparent bandwagon effects for the leading party.

Use in microeconomics

In microeconomics Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies how the individual parts of the economy, the household and the firms, make decisions to allocate limited resources, typically in markets where goods or services are being bought and sold. Microeconomics examines how these decisions and behaviours affect the supply and demand for goods and, bandwagon effect describes interactions of demand and preference.^[11] The bandwagon effect arises when people's preference for a commodity increases as the number of people buying it increases. This interaction potentially disturbs the normal results of the theory of supply and demand Supply and demand is an economic model of price determination in a market. It concludes that in a competitive market, price will function to equalize the quantity demanded by consumers, and the quantity supplied by producers, resulting in an economic equilibrium of price and quantity, which assumes that consumers make buying decisions solely based on price and their own personal preference. Gary Becker has even argued that the bandwagon effect could be so strong as to make the demand curve slope upward. This belies the fact that there is no empirical evidence for a bandwagon demand relationship with a positive coefficient. Others argue further that a positive coefficient is inconsistent with demand parameterizations and generates comparative static implications that are untenable.^[12] See network effect In economics and business, a network effect is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases as more people use it and Veblen good In economics, Veblen goods are a group of commodities for which peoples' preference for buying them increases as a direct function of their price, as greater price confers greater status, instead of decreasing according to the law of demand. A Veblen good is often also a positional good.

See also

• Bandwagon
• Bandwagon fan Fan loyalty is the loyalty felt and expressed by a fan towards the object of his/her fanaticism. Allegiances can be strong or weak. The loyalties of sports fans have been studied by psychologists, who have determined several factors that create such loyalties. Fan loyalty can be threatened by team actions
• Bandwagoning In realist theories of international relations, bandwagoning refers to the act of weaker states joining a stronger power or coalition within balance of power politics. The term is opposed to balancing, and unlike balancing, is a relatively new term. Bandwagoning was coined by Quincy Wright in A Study of War and popularized by Kenneth Waltz in
• Collective behavior The term "collective behavior" was first used by Robert E. Park, and employed definitively by Herbert Blumer, to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure , but which emerge in a "spontaneous" way
• Collective consciousness Collective consciousness was a term coined by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim to refer to the shared beliefs and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. One might recommend collective conscience as a superior translation of Durkheim's concept, in part due to the busy association of the word "consciousness"
• Collective effervescence Collective effervescence is a perceived energy formed by a gathering of people as might be experienced at a sporting event, a carnival, a rave, or a riot. This perception can cause people to act differently than in their everyday life
• Collective intelligence Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computer networks. The study of collective intelligence may properly be considered a subfield of
• Communal reinforcement Communal reinforcement is a social phenomenon in which a concept or idea is repeatedly asserted in a community, regardless of whether sufficient empirical evidence has been presented to support it. Over time, the concept or idea is reinforced to become a strong belief in many people's minds, and may be regarded by the members of the community as
• Conformism Conformism is a term used to describe the suspension of an individual's self-determined actions or opinions in favour of obedience to the mandates or conventions of one's peer-group, or deference to the imposed norms of a supervening authority
• Crowd psychology Crowd psychology is a branch of social psychology. Ordinary people can typically gain direct power by acting collectively. Historically, because large groups of people have been able to bring about dramatic and sudden social change in a manner that bypasses established due process, they have also provoked controversy. Social scientists have
• Group behaviour Group behaviour in sociology refers to the situations where people interact in large or small groups. The field of group dynamics deals with small groups that may reach consensus and act in a coordinated way. Groups of a large number of people in a given area may act simultaneously to achieve a goal that differs from what individuals would do
• Herd behavior Herd behavior describes how individuals in a group can act together without planned direction. The term pertains to the behavior of animals in herds, flocks, and schools, and to human conduct during activities such as stock market bubbles and crashes, street demonstrations, sporting events, religious gatherings, episodes of mob violence and even
• Keeping up with the Joneses "Keeping up with the Joneses" is a catchphrase in many parts of the English-speaking world referring to the comparison to one's neighbour as a benchmark for social caste or the accumulation of material goods. To fail to "keep up with the Joneses" is perceived as demonstrating socio-economic or cultural inferiority
• List of cognitive biases A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations . Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable facts. The existence of some of these cognitive
• Me too The short phrase "me too" became an internet cultural phenomenon during the early and mid 1990s on Usenet, a massive distributed discussion system
• Meme A meme is a unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. (The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word μιμητισμός ([mɪmetɪsmos]) for "something imitated".) Supporters of the concept regard memes as
• Network effect In economics and business, a network effect is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases as more people use it
• Ochlocracy Ochlocracy or mob rule is government by mob or a mass of people, or the intimidation of constitutional authorities. As a pejorative for majoritarianism, it is akin to the Latin phrase mobile vulgus meaning "the fickle crowd", from which the English term "mob" was originally derived in the 1680s
• Peer pressure Peer pressure refers to the influence exerted by a peer group in encouraging a person to change his or her attitudes, values, or behavior in order to conform to group norms. Social groups affected include membership groups, when the individual is "formally" a member , or a social clique. A person affected by peer pressure may or may not
• Sheeple Sheeple is a term of disparagement, in which people are likened to sheep
• Snowball effect
• Social comparison theory Social comparison is a theory initially proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954. This theory explains how individuals evaluate their own opinions and desires by comparing themselves to others
• Spiral of silence The spiral of silence is a political science and mass communication theory propounded by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. The theory asserts that a person is less likely to voice an opinion on a topic if one feels that one is in the minority for fear of reprisal or isolation from the majority
• Veblen good In economics, Veblen goods are a group of commodities for which peoples' preference for buying them increases as a direct function of their price, as greater price confers greater status, instead of decreasing according to the law of demand. A Veblen good is often also a positional good
• Pop music Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented towards a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short and simple love songs and utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes. Pop music has absorbed influences from most other forms of popular music, but as a genre is

References

1. ^ Andrew Colman, Oxford Dictionary of Psychology (Oxford: University, 2003) 77.
2. ^ Asch, S. E. (1955). Opinions and social pressure. Scientific American, 193, 31-35.
3. ^ Sherif, M. (1936). The psychology of social norms. New York: Harper Collins.
4. ^ Bikhchandani, Sushil, Hirshleifer, David, and Welch, Ivo, (1992), "A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades," Journal of Political Economy, Volume 100, Issue 5, pp. 992-1026.
5. ^ Lohmann, S., 1994. The Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989-91. World Politics, Vol. 47, No. 1. pp. 42-101.
6. ^ "Bandwagon". Dictionary.com. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bandwagon. Retrieved 2007-03-09.
7. ^ "Bandwagon Effect". http://www.wordwizard.com/ch_forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=6642&SearchTerms=bandwagon,effect. Retrieved 2007-03-09.
8. ^ "New Evidence About the Existence of a Bandwagon Effect in the Opinion Formation Process". International Political Science Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, 203-213 (1993). doi A digital object identifier is a character string used to uniquely identify an electronic document or other object. Metadata about the object is stored in association with the DOI name and this metadata may include a location, such as a URL, where the object can be found. The DOI for a document is permanent, whereas its location and other metadata:10.1177/019251219301400204. http://ips.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/2/203. Retrieved 2007-03-09.
9. ^ 5 states may lose half of GOP delegates
10. ^ Florida Democrats Stripped of Convention Delegates Due to Early Primary
11. ^ Harvey Leibenstein Harvey Leibenstein was a Ukrainian born American economist. Among his important contributions we may single out the introduction of the concept of X-efficiency, “Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumers’ Demand,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (May 1950).
12. ^ Gisser, Misch, James McClure, Giray Ökten, & Gary Santoni. 2009. "Some Anomalies Arising from Bandwagons that Impart Upward Sloping Segments to Market Demand". Econ Journal Watch 6(1): 21-34.[1]

• Goidel, Robert K., and Todd G. Shields. "The Vanishing Marginals, the Bandwagon, and the Mass Media." The Journal of Politics The Journal of Politics is a leading peer-reviewed international general journal of political science founded in 1939 and published quarterly by Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association. It is usually abbreviated as "JoP." The journal can be accessed online via Blackwell Synergy (older volumes before 20 56 (1994): 802-810. 11 Apr. 2007 http://www.jstor.org/view/00223816/di976651/97p03825/0
• McAllister, Ian, and Donley T. Studlar. "Bandwagon, Underdog, or Projection? Opinion Polls and Electoral Choice in Britain, 1979-1987." The Journal of Politics The Journal of Politics is a leading peer-reviewed international general journal of political science founded in 1939 and published quarterly by Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association. It is usually abbreviated as "JoP." The journal can be accessed online via Blackwell Synergy (older volumes before 20 53 (1991): 720-740. 9 Apr. 2007.
• Mehrabian, Albert. "Effects of Poll Reports on Voter Preferences." Journal of Applied Social Psychology 28 (1998): 2119-2130. 11 Apr. 2007 http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/results/results_common.jhtml?nn=4
• Morwitz, Vicki G., and Carol Pluzinski. "Do Polls Reflect Opinions or Do Opinions Reflect Polls?" Journal of Consumer Research os 23 (1996): 53-65. 8 Apr. 2007.

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