A 2008 study published by the American Political Science Association by Alan Gerber, Donald Green & Christopher Larimer lays out a convincing case of how social pressure can lead to increased voter turnout.

We lamented in a previous blog post, how political pundits are talking about voter turnout incorrectly. 

The Science

This study does exactly the type of large scale experiments that the GOP should be doing more of.

This study shows us that by using social norms (rules of conduct that are socially enforced) we can have a greater effect on voter turnout, with some words of caution.

In this experiment, conducted prior to the August 2006 primary election, 180,002 HH were used.  HH were assigned to treatment groups and were sent one mailing 11 days prior to the election.

HH were randomly assigned to the control group or 1 of 4 treatment groups.   Each treatment group had 20,000 HH and 99,999 were in the control group.

Each HH in a treatment group, received one of the four mailings.  The control group received none.

All four treatment groups received the basic message of “DO YOUR CIVIC DUTY – VOTE”

Group 1 “Civic Duty”  Group.  This group is a baseline.  It does little besides emphasizing civic duty.

Group 2 “Hawthorne” Group – Adds to Group 1 a mild form of social pressure.  By adding a “Hawthorne effect” or “You are being studied”.  It limited social pressure by promising researchers would neither contact nor disclose the results.

Group 3 “Self” Group – Adds more social pressure by informing recipients that who votes is public information and listing the recent voting records of each registered voter in the HH.   It also put “VOTED” next to those that voted and a blank spaces to those HH members that had not.

Group 4 “Neighbors” Group – Adds even more social pressure by not only listing the HH voting records, but also the voting records of those living nearby.   Like the “Self” mailer, the “Neighbors” tells the group that researchers are planning on updating the chart after the election.

The results

After the election, turnout was measured

The Neighbor group had a 8.1% increase in turnout over the control group.

This  is impressive.

As the study states:

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).

The study does go on to say nicely that the “enforcement of norms is potentially costly” meaning, this technique REALLY pisses voters off.

Also for practitioners to keep in mind, we must ad partisanship into the equation and test; however, it is data worth considering. Read the entire study here.