David W. Nickerson

Is Voting Contagious? Evidence from Two Field Experiments

Members of the same household share similar voting behaviors on average, but how much of this correlation can be attributed to the behavior of the other person in the household? Disentangling and isolating the unique effects of peer behavior, selection processes, and congruent interests is a challenge for all studies of interpersonal influence. This study proposes and utilizes a carefully designed placebo-controlled experimental protocol to overcome this identification problem. During a face-to-face canvassing experiment targeting households with two registered voters, residents who answered the door were exposed to either a Get Out the Vote message (treatment) or a recycling pitch (placebo). The turnout of the person in the household not answering the door allows for contagion to be measured. Both experiments find that 60% of the propensity to vote is passed onto the other member of the household. This finding suggests a mechanism by which civic participation norms are adopted and couples grow more similar over time.

Do You Have a Voting Plan?: Implementation Intentions, Voter Turnout, and Organic Plan Making

Phone calls encouraging citizens to vote are staples of modern campaigns. Insights from psychological science can make these calls dramatically more potent while also generating opportunities to expand psychological theory. We present a field experiment conducted during the 2008 presidential election (N = 287,228) showing that facilitating the formation of a voting plan (i.e., implementation intentions) can increase turnout by 4.1 percentage points among those contacted, but a standard encouragement call and self-prediction have no significant impact. Among single-eligible-voter households, the formation of a voting plan increased turnout among persons contacted by 9.1 percentage points, whereas those in multiple-eligible-voter households were unaffected by all scripts. Some situational factors may organically facilitate implementation-intentions formation more readily than others; we present data suggesting that this could explain the differential treatment effect that we found. We discuss implications for psychological and political science, and public interventions involving implementation-intentions formation.

Partisan Mobilization Campaigns in the Field: Results from a Statewide Turnout Experiment in Michigan

Political parties have recently rediscovered grassroots tactics for voter mobilization. The only solid evidence for the effectiveness of such get-out-the-vote (GOTV) tactics is based upon non-partisan field experiments that may not accurately capture the effectiveness of partisan campaign outreach. In order to address this lacuna, during the 2002 Michigan gubernatorial election, a large field experiment across 14 state house districts evaluated the cost effectiveness of three mobilization technologies utilized by the Michigan Democratic Party’s Youth Coordinated Campaign: door hangers, volunteer phone calls, and face-to-face visits. Contrary to past non-partisan experiments, our results indicate that all three GOTV strategies possess similar cost-effectiveness.

Causality in Political Networks

Investigations of American politics have increasingly turned to analyses of political networks to understand public opinion, voting behavior, the diffusion of policy ideas, bill sponsorship in the legislature, interest group coalitions and influence, party factions, institutional development, and other empirical phenomena. While the association between political networks and political behavior is well established, clear causal inferences are often difficult to make. This article consists of five independent essays that address practical problems in making causal inferences from studies of political networks. They consider egocentric studies of national probability samples, sociocentric studies of political communities, measurement error in elite surveys, field experiments on networks, and triangulating on causal processes.

Volunteer Phone Calls Can Increase Turnout Evidence From Eight Field Experiments

Gerber and Green argue that get-out-the-vote phone calls do not increase turnout based upon field experiments testing nonpartisan professional phone banks. This article argues that the quality of the phone calls matter and that brief, nonpartisan phone calls can raise voter turnout if they are sufficiently personal. To test this hypothesis, a series of eight volunteer nonpartisan phone campaigns to mobilize voters were studied using randomized, controlled experiments. The campaigns targeted voters across six different cities in 2000 and 2001. Contra Gerber and Green, the phone calls are found to boost turnout 3.8 percentage points. Based on these estimates, volunteer phone calls produce one vote for every

Does Email Boost Turnout

26 per vote, which is cost competitive with door-to-door canvassing. Differences between the professional phone banks previously studied by Gerber and Green and the volunteer phone banks herein are also discussed.

Comparing Negative and Positive Campaign Messages Evidence From Two Field Experiments

Political campaigns are just now learning how to put the Internet to best use. Low transaction costs and huge economies of scale tempt campaigns to move traditional activities online, but the effectiveness of virtual campaigns is unknown. This paper conducts 13 field experiments on 232,716 subjects to test whether email campaigns are effective for voter registration and mobilization. Both registration and turnout were unaffected, suggesting that email, while inexpensive, is not cost-effective.

The Cost of Convenience An Experiment Showing E-Mail Outreach Decreases Voter Registration

Considerable research indicates that personal contact from political campaigns can mobilize people to vote, but little attention has been given to whether the tone of the message matters. Studies of message tone have mostly been confined to mass media campaigns and ignored the growing role grassroots techniques play in contemporary political campaigns. Two randomized field experiments were conducted to determine the importance of message tone in grassroots contact. We find evidence that personally delivered messages can be effective at influencing voting preferences, but neither experiment uncovered a systematic difference between the effects of negative and positive messages on voter turnout or political attitudes.

Partisan Mobilization Using Volunteer Phone Banks and Door Hangers

Lower transaction costs have shifted voter registration activities online and away from traditional modes of outreach. Downloading forms may impose higher transaction costs than traditional outreach for some people and thereby decrease electoral participation. A randomized, controlled experiment tested this hypothesis by encouraging treatment participants via e-mail to use online voter registration tools. The treatment group was 0.3 percentage points less likely to be registered to vote after the election. A follow-up experiment sent reminders via text message to randomly selected people who had downloaded registration forms. The treatment increased rates of registration by 4 percentage points, suggesting that reminders can ameliorate many of the negative effects of directing people to downloadable online registration forms.

Hunting the Elusive Young Voter

This article presents the results from a statewide partisan voter mobilization experiment in Michigan during the 2002 gubernatorial election. The tactics studied are volunteer phone calls and door hangers. With regard to turnout, the conclusion reached is that volunteer phone calls boost turnout by 3.2 percentage points and door hangers boost turnout by 1.2 percentage points. This effect size implies that both mobilization technologies are cost-competitive with door knocking and that partisan and nonpartisan campaigns are equally effective at increasing turnout. A postelection survey was used to determine whether the partisan blandishments to vote changed candidate preference. No evidence of persuasion from campaign contact was detected by the survey. However, the survey did indicate that the campaign failed in targeting likely Democratic voters and excluding likely Republican voters, emphasizing the need for detailed party databases.