Abstract
Young voters, including college students, turnout less than older citizens—particularly in non-presidential elections. We examine two promising intervention strategies in the 2018 midterm elections: information cues and social pressure. Additionally, we consider whether voting information and social pressure to vote spread to others through social ties. Using a large-scale field experiment involving sections of a university-wide first-year writing seminar, we examine whether informational and social pressure presentations are effective strategies for increasing college student voter turnout. Furthermore, by linking each student in our study to their roommates, we assess whether there were spillover effects from the interventions. Though the treatments did not alone affect turnout, we find positive effects from classroom treatments among first-year students who were registered to vote prior to the presentations. Additionally, we find positive peer spillover effects for turnout from the social pressure treatment when the roommate of the treated student was previously registered to vote.
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Notes
Our hypotheses for this study were pre-registered with Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP), ID 20181022AA. Hypotheses H4-H6 specify “on-campus” roommates. While there were some students in the sample with local off-campus addresses, none of them had roommates in the classes randomly assigned to treatment condition, and they were therefore not eligible to be included in the models testing roommate effects.
Discussions with a director of residential life at the university revealed that first-year roommates are not randomly assigned.
We do not employ a full factorial design in this instance. While such a design would allow us to infer the main effect of social pressure absent information, such a condition would be devoid of content and render the social pressure treatment meaningless, since in this context the social pressure treatment would not have made much sense without the information treatment. As such, we remain agnostic about whether social pressure may affect and thereby enhance the strength of the treatment, or whether it may carry an independent effect.
A total of six student presenters were used, and variation in treatment effectiveness was assessed by accounting for potential random effects of presenter on turnout. There was significant variation among the presenters, suggesting that some were more effective than others; these results are presented in Table A8 of the online supplemental file.
All analyses were also estimated using logistic regression (see Table A7 in the online supplemental file). Results were consistent across estimation approach.
The registrar data coded all students as either male or female gender. Students living on campus live in rooms consisting of either all male or all female students. Most off-campus students in the sample lived in single-gender rooms as well. Four students who had a mix of female and male students living in a room were excluded from the analyses.
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The data and replication code are publicly available https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8KQHYP. The authors are grateful for insightful feedback provided by the anonymous reviewers. A special thanks is extended to Suchitra Webster, Renee Brown, Catalist, participants at the 2019 APSA conference, and the entire team of MSUvote.
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Bergan, D.E., Carnahan, D., Lajevardi, N. et al. Promoting the Youth Vote: The Role of Informational Cues and Social Pressure. Polit Behav 44, 2027–2047 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09686-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09686-x