TCU Neeley Research Highlight – Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship Aaron Anglin alongside other experts share research insights with industry and academic leaders.
January 31, 2024
TCU Neeley’s Aaron Anglin partnered with other experts to explore how entrepreneurs’ political expressions affect their crowdfunding success. Their study reveals that campaigns perceived as political, regardless of ideology, tend to receive less funding, though this effect is lessened if the entrepreneur has strong credibility indicators like past success or media endorsements. (Journal of Business Venturing, 2024).
Abstract
Drawing from expectancy violation theory, we investigate how entrepreneurs' language-based expressions of their political ideology influence the performance of their crowdfunding campaigns. We argue that crowdfunding funders expect campaigns to be apolitical, suggesting that entrepreneurs' expressing their political ideologies – regardless of the specific ideology – create a negative expectancy violation that decreases funding performance. As source credibility is a central boundary condition for expectancy violation theory predictions, we also suggest this relationship is mitigated by three indicators of entrepreneurial credibility: prior successful experience, media usage, and third-party endorsements. Using a sample of 19,898 Kickstarter campaigns and a randomized experiment, we find support for our theoretical predictions.
