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GET OUT THE VOTE! How to Increase Voter Turnout

Donald P. Green, Director, Institution for Social and Policy Studies and A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Political Science at Yale University, discusses his and Alan S. Gerber’s book, which was released in 2008.

Our book GET OUT THE VOTE!: How To Increase Voter Turnout is designed to help partisan and nonpartisan voter mobilization campaigns make smart decisions when deciding how to allocate their resources. Campaigns have devised many tactics for encouraging voters to cast ballots: door-to-door canvassing, live and pre-recorded phone calls, leaflets, direct mail, e-mail, televised advertisements, Election Day festivals — the list goes on and on. Some, like pre-recorded phone calls and mass email, are inexpensive and reach large numbers of people instantly. Other tactics, like door-to-door canvassing and televised commercial messages, require advance planning and sometimes large start-up costs. The question is, which tactics actually work? And among those tactics that produce votes, which ones produce the most votes per dollar spent?

What sets this book apart from other campaign guides is the type of evidence used to answer these questions. The book is a compilation of experiments, each of which compares the turnout rates of two groups, one that was randomly assigned to receive a campaign’s treatment (direct mail, for example) and another that received nothing from the campaign. This style of evaluation has grown rapidly since the publication of the first edition, and the new edition summarizes the results of more than 100 randomized experiments.

Many of the conclusions from the first edition have been bolstered by the new wave of experimental evidence. Randomized experiments on the effectiveness of GOTV tactics such as door-to-door canvassing, phone calls, mail, and email suggest that the more personal a tactic, the more effective it is. Face-to-face contact seems to be the most effective tactic, raising turnout by 7-12 percentage points among those who are contacted. Email and robotic calls, on the other hand, are impersonal tactics that seem to have no detectable effect on turnout, even among those who listen to the call or open email from a campaign.

Not all of the earlier conclusions remain intact. Leaflets, which looked potentially promising in the first edition based on a very small set of experiments, now appear to be just another ineffective impersonal tactic. Partisan direct mail, for which there was a glimmer of hope in the first edition, seems on average to be ineffective.

The new edition also breaks new ground with two additional chapters. The first looks at a variety of media campaigns - television, radio, and newspapers. The second examines the effects of campaign events, such as Election Day festivals, candidate debates, and voter education seminars. Although much experimental testing lies ahead, the studies conducted to date suggest that properly crafted outreach campaigns may be cost-effective.

Finally, readers will for the first time find a synopsis of the emerging literature on voter persuasion, as opposed to voter mobilization. Although the relative cost-effectiveness of persuasion and mobilization remains an unsettled question, studies of campaigns that seek to change voters’ minds seem to suggest that it is often difficult and expensive.

The 2004 election will be remembered as an election in which both parties emphasized voter mobilization rather than voter persuasion. The campaigns sensed early on that there were relatively few swing voters. They focused their energies on energizing their respective activist bases, which in turn supplied armies of canvassers and volunteer callers. The 2008 election may prove to be another mobilization-centered competition, fought during the final weeks in battleground states. Both parties and nonpartisan groups will look to rigorous scientific studies as they plan their campaigns. GET OUT THE VOTE! strives to provide them an accessible, objective, and up-to-date summary of what works and what doesn’t. VCM

Donald P. Green is Director of Institution for Social and Policy Studies and A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Alan S. Gerber is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of American Politics at Yale University

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