A VERY Cheap Turnout-Boosting Method Democrats Need To Embrace

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Mar 30, 2008 at 18:34

The study, "Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Largescale Field Experiment" [PDF] by Alan Gerber and Donald Green, both of Yale, and Christopher Larimer of the University Of Northern Iowa, was published in the American Political Science Review, What it says, simply, is that voter turnout can be dramatically increased--in some cases, at least--simply by sending folks a postcard with the right message on it.  The right message was simply a record of their votring record, along with that of their nearby neighbors, a means of bringing social pressure to bear to motivate civic participation.

It's a hell of a lot cheaper than any of the more conventional GOTV methods, though of course it's significantly less targetted (no identifying "1s," "2s" and "3s").  But if your supporters are disproportionately folks who don't tend to vote automatically--i.e. if you're a progressive Democrat, or a moderate Republican in a primary--then this could make a lot of sense, particularly in tandem with the right mix of more conventional practices, which is probably more necessary for progressive Democrats than for moderate Republicans.  It's my feeling that the potential realignment process going on around us offers another compelling reason to take a close look at what this study reports, and the opportunities it indicates.

Voter turnout theories based on rational self-interested behavior generally fail to predict significant turnout unless they account for the utility that citizens receive from performing their civic duty. We distinguish between two aspects of this type of utility, intrinsic satisfaction from behaving in accordance with a norm and extrinsic incentives to comply, and test the effects of priming intrinsic motives and applying varying degrees of extrinsic pressure. A large-scale field experiment involving several hundred thousand registered voters used a series of mailings to gauge these effects. Substantially higher turnout was observed among those who received mailings promising to publicize their turnout to their household or their neighbors. These findings demonstrate the profound importance of social pressure as an inducement to political participation.

The authors explain the experimental setup thus:

This study departs from prior work on this subject by conducting an experiment designed to prime voters to think about civic duty while at the same time applying different amounts of social pressure in order to induce them to adhere to this norm. Unlike most previous experiments, which have taken place in laboratory settings, ours takes place in the context of an actual election. Prior to the August 2006 primary election inMichigan, approximately 80,000 households were sent one of four mailings encouraging them to vote. The content of these mailings was inspired by historical and cross-national examples of policies that publicized the names of voters and nonvoters (Lijphart 1997). One experimental group received a mailing that merely reminded them that voting is a civic duty; in a second group, they were told that researchers would be studying their turnout based on public records; a third treatment group received mailings displaying the record of turnout among those in the household; a fourth mailing revealed both the household's voter turnout and their neighbors' turnout. The latter two treatments suggested that a follow-up mailing after the electionwould report to the household or the neighborhood the subject's turnout in the upcoming election.

And they explain the results thus:

The control group in our study voted at a rate of 29.7%. By comparison, the "Civic Duty" treatment group voted at a rate of 31.5%, suggesting that appeals to civic duty alone raise turnout by 1.8 percentage points. Adding social pressure in the form of Hawthorne effects raises turnout to 32.2%, which implies a 2.5  percentagepoint gain over the control group. The effect of showing households their own voting records is dramatic. Turnout climbs to 34.5%, a 4.9 percentage-point increase over the control group. Even more dramatic is the effect of showing households both their own voting records and the voting records of their neighbors. Turnout in this experimental group is 37.8%, which implies a remarkable 8.1 percentage-point treatment effect.

That's an 8.1 percent increase in the raw turnout rate.  But since the original turnout rate was just 29.7%, it's an increase of 27.3% over that base rate.  In other words, for every four people who voted without proding, a fifth person voted, just because they got a postcard in the mail.

The description of results continued, discussing the magnitude of effects in a comparative framework:

It is important to underscore the magnitude of these effects. The 8.1 percentage-point effect is not only bigger than any mail effect gauged by a randomized experiment; it exceeds the effect of live phone calls (Arceneaux, Gerber, and Green 2006; Nickerson 2006b) and rivals the effect of face-to-face contact with canvassers conducting get-out-the-vote campaigns (Arceneaux 2005; Gerber and Green 2000; Gerber, Green, and Green 2003). Even allowing for the fact that our experiment focused on registered voters, rather than voting-eligible citizens, the effect of the Neighbors treatment is impressive. An 8.1 percentage-point increase in turnout among registered voters in a state where registered voters comprise75% of voting-eligible citizens translates into a 6.1 percentage-point increase in the overall turnout rate. By comparison, policy interventions such as Election Day registration or vote-by-mail, which seek to raise turnout by lowering the costs of voting, are thought to have effects on the order of 3 percentage-points or less (Knack 2001).

If the differences in terms of magnitude were significant, the difference in terms of cost-efficiency were even larger:

In terms of sheer cost efficiency, mailings that exert social pressure far outstrip door-to-door canvassing. The powder blue mailings used here were printed on one side and cost 30 cents apiece to print and mail. Treating each experimental group therefore cost approximately $6,000. The "Self" mailing generated 1,854 votes at a rate of $3.24 per vote. The "Neighbors" mailing generated 3,106 votes at $1.93 per vote. By comparison, a typical door-to-door canvassing campaign produces votes at a rate of roughly $20 per vote, while phone banks tend to come in at $35 or more per vote (Green and Gerber 2004).

So what's the catch?  Well, these were primarily Republican voters--at least presumably--in a primary election, with one significant, but not earth-shattering, statewide nomination battle:

Our field experiment was conducted in Michigan prior
to the August 2006 primary election. The August 2006 primary was a statewide election with a wide range of offices and proposals on the ballot, most of which were limited to counties, cities, and local districts. In August 2006, the only statewide offices appearing on the ballot were Governor and U.S. Senate. There were no important contested statewide Democratic primary elections. The incumbent Democrats, Senator Stabenow and Governor Granholm, were unopposed on the ballot. The Republican candidate for Governor was also unopposed, but there was a moderately hard-fought primary contest for the Republican nomination forU.S. Senate. In addition, the election featured a scattering of primary contests in several of Michigan's 15 Congressional seats, but only one was likely to affect the ultimate winner of a seat: the Republican primary in the 7th Congressional District. Each voter was allowed to vote in either the Democratic primary or the Republican primary, but could not vote for a combination of parties in the primary.

The voter's choice of party is secret under Michigan law, and there is no party registration. For those intending to vote as Democrats, there was little reason to vote in the 2006 primary apart from the occasional nonpartisan judicial race or contested local office. For Republicans, there was at least some interest throughout the state, since both U.S. Senate candidates spent significant funds and solicited votes wherever they could find them. Voter turnout in the August 2006 primary was 1,282,203, or 17.7% of registered voters.

Subject to the limitations of no party registration, the authors attempted to target those with a higher probability of voting Republican.

It seems fairly straightforward that this study points to a valuable strategy for moderate Republicans trying to regain power in their own party.  Unfortunately for them, with 18% leaving the party since 2004, this information may well come too late.

Boo hoo.

For progressive Democrats things are not that simple.  Appeals to the norms of civic virtue and civic engagement are not likely to be as powerful motivators for progressive non-voters, who may well not vote for a very different set of reasons, as anyone who has ever done GOTV work can readily attest:  alienation and disgust with the system, GOP-lite campaigns that tell them their vote is not wanted, lack of supportive social networks, and reliable sources of political information, we've all seen these sorts of problems that are largely absent for the Republican primary voters who were the prime targets of this study.  Indeed, a large number of potential progressive non-voters are not even registered,

A report from the Public Poliocy Institute of California (PPIC) in September, 2006, "California's Exclusive Electorate" [PDF], made it quite clear that there is substantial gap between voters and non-voters in California, with the non-voters representing a much more racially diverse, and more  progressive population.  As PPIC noted in a press release:

The majority of likely voters are age 45 and older (62%), have household incomes of $60,000 or more (56%), and have college degrees (53%). In contrast, a vast majority of nonvoters are younger than age 45 (76%), and far fewer have household incomes of $60,000 or more (18%) or have college degrees (17%).

The differences in racial composition of the "two Californias" is striking:

So, too, is their possession of a piece of the American dream:

The policy consequences are equally stark:

All this indicates that the mother load of missing voters for progressives is not so easily reached.  But it hardly means that the social pressure model of spurring civic participation described in this study is irrelevant for progressives.  Rather, it suggests that such methods could form part of a much broader, multi-pronged effort to siginificantly enhance the participation of progressive Americans who feel marginalized, rejected, even demonized by a system that is supposed to be their representative.

This is particularly true, given the widespread disillusion and disgust with the GOP.  As noted in my diary earlier today, 18% of those identifying as Repubicans in 2004 no longer consider themselves Republicans today.  That is a massive collapse in public confidence.  What's more, the Democratic skew among independents has intensified significantly since 2004.  This means that an effort similar to that in the study, targetting Democrats and Independents, could conceivably pay massive dividends this November.

Remember the cost-efficiencies involved:

The "Neighbors" mailing generated 3,106 votes at $1.93 per vote. By comparison, a typical door-to-door canvassing campaign produces votes at a rate of roughly $20 per vote, while phone banks tend to come in at $35 or more per vote (Green and Gerber 2004).

I am not suggesting that we stop doing canvassing or phone-banking.  What I am suggesting is that we take those more expensive methods, and retarget them at more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding long-term tasks--such as building up social infrastructure that welcomes a much larger percentage of the non-voting population into the registered population, where the much cheaper method will have the opportunity to do its stuff.