Menu Adam R Brown

Notes navigation: Browse by titleBrowse by authorSubject index

Green and Gerber: Introduction to Social Pressure and Voting: New Experimental Evidence

Disclaimer. Don't rely on these old notes in lieu of reading the literature, but they can jog your memory. As a grad student long ago, my peers and I collaborated to write and exchange summaries of political science research. I posted them to a wiki-style website. "Wikisum" is now dead but archived here. I cannot vouch for these notes' accuracy, nor can I say who wrote them.

Green, Donald P.; Gerber, Alan S. 2010. Introduction to Social Pressure and Voting: New Experimental Evidence. Political Behavior 32 (September): 331-336.

Two years ago, Gerber, Green, and Larimer (2008) shook up research on turnout with a stunning experimental result: You can raise turnout dramatically with a postcard. Not just any postcard, of course. If you received one of their postcards, you would have seen your own turnout record over the past few elections. You would also have seen the turnout record of all your neighbors. And you would have seen a warning that you would receive a new postcard after the election with updated data.

Threatening to expose non-voters to their neighbors in this manner had a large effect: Turnout jumped by 8.1 percentage points. That's as big an effect as sending door-to-door canvassers, but at a fraction of the cost. (Read more about the 2008 study here.)

The most recent issue of Political Behavior is filled with follow-up experiments. I assume that Green and Gerber guest-edited the issue, seeing as they wrote a brief introductory article and contributed to two of the remaining five articles, although the journal credits only the usual editors. If you're a political consultant and you're short on time, their introductory article (cited above) boils down the main punchline succinctly. To raise turnout with a postcard, you need these ingredients:

  1. You need to threaten to monitor whether recipients vote. You need to threaten to disclose non-voting publicly.
  2. It's more effective to shame non-voting than to honor voting.
  3. It's not necessary to remind people that voting is a duty. They already know that.

In a sense, then, voting is like pornography. Non-voting, like pornography, is frowned upon, so folks try to keep it private. But once you threaten to publicize that private behavior, it changes.

In my next few posts, I'll take a brief look at each of the articles in this special issue of Political Behavior. Here are some direct links to the reviews:

Research by the same authors

Research on similar subjects

Tags

Green, Donald P. (author)Gerber, Alan S. (author)American PoliticsExperimentMobilizationNormsPeer PressurePolitical BehaviorTurnoutVoting

Wikisum home: Index of all summaries by title, by author, or by subject.