Provoking Preferences by Changing Beliefs

志愿组织对成员的要求差别很大。 政党、工会、宗教协会和各种各样的利益集团在对信徒的期望上表现出巨大的差异。这个项目关注的是组织要求自我牺牲的情况。它关注的是一个工会，国际码头和仓库联盟（ILWU），其组织文化激发了成员的合作和牺牲的承诺，并继续这样做了七十多年，尽管重大的人口，技术和政治变化。该项目将收集数据，以审查工会成员和组织对劳动人民的政治态度和活动的影响。 这些数据将有助于建立更普遍的组织中的信念变化和偏好发展的来源。研究方法使用调查，重点访谈，选举数据分析，人种学实地工作和正式建模，并建立在调查员早期研究的比较，历史和定性案例研究的结果之上。 其结果将是细致入微的详细数据，这些数据将捕捉工人随着时间的推移的观点，同时为工会如何改变成员的信念提供证据。调查人员有着非同寻常的机会获得评估该项目主要论点所需的数据，包括过去和现在的数据。 随机选择新登记的临时工申请人，这是对那些处于沿岸工作职业阶梯第一级的工人的命名，近似于自然实验，ILWU允许在几个主要的西海岸码头采访这些新的和现有的工人。 该联盟还允许在未来几年内进行多次重复调查。 这项调查可以比较新员工和现有员工的偏好、信仰、态度和政治参与水平。这项调查收集了标准的人口统计信息，最重要的是，这项研究收集了有关受访者对政治、经济、工会和ILWU的看法的信息。调查的小组设计使调查人员能够跟踪随着时间的推移而发生的变化，并确定新一批工人的观点，信念和报告的行为是否以及在什么方向上发生变化，因为他们沉浸在职业社区中的时间延长。这三波调查将揭示：1）新的海滨雇员的观点与更长期服务的工人的观点在多大程度上趋同; 2）工会的培训和合同谈判的经验如何影响他们的态度; 3）新工人在多大程度上改变了工会。 虽然本研究的实证重点是工会，但该论点广泛适用于几乎所有类型的志愿组织。理解组织实践、信念变化以及成员如何排列偏好之间的因果关系的本质，对于关注一系列意识形态动机行为的政策制定者具有重要的广泛意义，包括参与世界上最紧迫冲突的一些群体所表现出的行为。

Voluntary organizations vary significantly in the demands they make of members. Political parties, labor unions, religious associations, and a wide variety of interest groups exhibit tremendous variation in their expectations of adherents. This project is concerned with cases where the organization demands self-sacrifice. It focuses on a union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), whose organizational culture provokes membership commitments to cooperation and sacrifice and has continued to do so for more than seventy years, despite major demographic, technological, and political changes. The project will collect data for examining the influence of union membership and organization on the political attitudes and activities of working people. These data will help establish the sources of belief change and preference development in organizations more generally.The research approach uses surveys, focused interviews, electoral data analysis, ethnographic field work, and formal modeling and builds on findings from the comparative, historical, and qualitative case studies of the investigator's earlier research. The result will be nuanced and detailed data that capture workers' perspectives over time while providing evidence for how the union changes members' beliefs. The investigators have extraordinary access to the kind of data needed to evaluate the project's main arguments-both in the past and the present. The randomized selection of applicants for jobs as newly registered Identified Casuals, the nomenclature for those workers on the first of the occupational rungs of longshore work, approximates a natural experiment, and the ILWU has permitted interviews of these new as well as existing workers on several major West Coast docks. The union is also permitting repeat surveys several times over the next years. The survey allows for a comparison of the preferences, beliefs, attitudes, and political participation levels of incoming and existing workers over time. The survey gathers standard demographic information and, most importantly for this study, information concerning respondents' perspectives on politics, economics, unions, and the ILWU. The panel design of the survey allows the investigators to track changes over time and determine if and in what directions the views, beliefs, and reported behaviors of the new cohort of workers change as their immersion in the occupational community lengthens. The three survey waves will reveal: 1) how much the views of new waterfront employees converge with more long-serving workers; 2) how, if at all, the union's training and the experience of a contract negotiation shapes their attitudes; and 3) the extent to which the new workers transform the union. While the empirical focus of this study is labor unions, the argument is broadly applicable to virtually all types of voluntary organizations. Understanding the nature of the causal link between organizational practices, belief change, and how members rank preferences has significant broader implications for policymakers concerned with a range of ideologically-motivated behaviors, including those exhibited by some of the groups involved in some the world's most pressing conflicts.