Abstract
Prior experimental research has demonstrated that voter turnout rises substantially when people receive mailings that indicate whether they voted in previous elections. This effect suggests that voters are sensitive to whether their compliance with the norm of voting is being monitored. The present study extends this line of research by investigating whether disclosure of past participation has a stronger effect on turnout when it calls attention to a past abstention or a past vote. A sample of 369,211 registered voters who voted in just one of two recent elections were randomly assigned to receive no mail, mail that encouraged them to vote, and mail that both encouraged them to vote and indicated their turnout in one previous election. The latter type of mailing randomly reported either the election in which they voted or the one in which they abstained. Results suggest that mailings disclosing past voting behavior had strong effects on voter turnout and that these effects were significantly enhanced when it disclosed an abstention in a recent election.
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Notes
With regard to negative feedback, several factors, including self-esteem of the one receiving feedback (Bandura and Locke 2003), the credibility of the source (Podsakoff and Farh 1989), the complexity of the task (Ashby and O’Brien 2007), and whether the subject receiving feedback is motivated to reduce the “discrepancy” between their goal and feedback received (Kluger and DeNisi 1996) moderate the effectiveness of such feedback.
This figure represents a subset of the 585,378 households (807,021 individuals) described in Larimer (2009). Here we restrict attention to just those voters who voted in one of the past two elections, whereas Larimer (2009) examines, in addition, voters who voted in both or neither of these elections. We also limit the sample to people living in towns where an election was held in 2005. It should be noted that the average effect of the social pressure mailing (described below) is approximately the same regardless of how the sample is defined. In Larimer (2009), the social pressure mailing increases turnout from 27.7% in the control group (N = 772,479 individuals) to 32.4% (N = 27,609 individuals). Another 6,933 people received a mailing that encouraged them to vote but did not show their vote history; their turnout was 29.1%, which again is similar to the results reported by Gerber et al. (2008).
Although five elections are listed in Table 1, the November 2005 and 2006 are, by design, perfectly collinear, since voters were selected on the grounds that they participated in just one of them.
The effect of past abstention appears to be slightly larger when the abstention occurred in 2005, which is surprising given that it was a low turnout election. The interaction between treatment and the year in which one abstained is not statistically significant.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University and to Practical Political Consulting, which funded components of this research but bear no responsibility for the content of this report. Special thanks go to Mark Grebner of Practical Political Consulting, who designed and administered the mail program studied here. This research was reviewed and approved by the Yale Human Subjects Committee.
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Appendix: Mailings
Appendix: Mailings
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Gerber, A.S., Green, D.P. & Larimer, C.W. An Experiment Testing the Relative Effectiveness of Encouraging Voter Participation by Inducing Feelings of Pride or Shame. Polit Behav 32, 409–422 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9110-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9110-4