Is There Backlash to Social Pressure? A Large-scale Field Experiment on Voter Mobilization

Using social pressure to mobilize voters has generated impressive increases in turnout (Gerber et al. Am Polit Sci Rev 102:33–48, 2008). However, voters may have negative reactions to social pressure treatments that reduce their effectiveness. Social psychologists have observed this ‘reactance’ to persuasive pressure about other behavior, but it has been overlooked in voter mobilization. Using a large-scale field experiment, we find treatments designed to reduce reactance are just as effective as heavy-handed social pressure treatments in mobilizing voters. The success of gentler social pressure treatments should make the use of social pressure more palatable to voter mobilization organizations.     

Quality Is Job One: Professional and Volunteer Voter Mobilization Calls

Campaigns rely upon both paid and volunteer phone calls to mobilize voters. Past field experiments show calls from volunteers to increase turnout and paid calls to be wholly ineffective. This article argues that the quality of phone calls rather than the presence or absence of a payroll explains this regularity. Three aspects of quality are considered: monitoring pace and interactivity, timing, and message. A fully randomized field experiment with over 100,000 subjects comparing professional and volunteer phone banks simultaneously was conducted during the 2002 congressional elections to test this hypothesis. The experiment discovers precisely the opposite relationship of prior research: effective professional phone banks and inefficient volunteer phone calls. The experiment also finds substantial temporal decay. The specific messages appear less important than tone or timing. The implications for the role of campaign consultants, replacing social capital, voter psychology, and the capacities of civic organizations are discussed.     

Comparing Experimental and Matching Methods Using a Large-Scale Voter Mobilization Experiment

Alan S. Gerber and Donald P. Green Yale University, Institution for Social and Policy Studies, P.O. Box 208209, 77 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06520 e-mail: kevin.arceneaux{at}temple.edu (corresponding author) e-mail: alan.gerber{at}yale.edu e-mail: donald.green{at}yale.edu In the social sciences, randomized experimentation is the optimalresearch design for establishing causation. However, for a numberof practical reasons, researchers are sometimes unable to conductexperiments and must rely on observational data. In an effortto develop estimators that can approximate experimental resultsusing observational data, scholars have given increasing attentionto matching. In this article, we test the performance of matchingby gauging the success with which matching approximates experimentalresults. The voter mobilization experiment presented here comprisesa large number of observations (60,000 randomly assigned tothe treatment group and nearly two million assigned to the controlgroup) and a rich set of covariates. This study is analyzedin two ways. The first method, instrumental variables estimation,takes advantage of random assignment in order to produce consistentestimates. The second method, matching estimation, ignores randomassignment and analyzes the data as though they were nonexperimental.Matching is found to produce biased results in this applicationbecause even a rich set of covariates is insufficient to controlfor preexisting differences between the treatment and controlgroup. Matching, in fact, produces estimates that are no moreaccurate than those generated by ordinary least squares regression.The experimental findings show that brief paid get-out-the-votephone calls do not increase turnout, while matching and regressionshow a large and significant effect.     

利益表达、资源动员与议程设置——对于“闹大”现象的描述性分析

在当前社会转型时期的利益冲突中",闹大"已经成为公民抗争的重要逻辑。本文以近年来大量具有闹大特点的社会事件为研究对象,从理论上归纳了闹大的发展过程,概括和抽象了闹大的逻辑,并在公民与政府关系的框架下,从利益表达、资源动员和议程设置三个方面对闹大的功能性作用进行了深入的描述性分析。从利益表达的角度分析,闹大主要涉及到谁来表达、如何表达以及表达了什么的问题;从资源动员的角度分析,闹大的主要问题是动员的对象、动员过程的特征和动员的机制等问题;从议程设置的角度分析,闹大则与公民成为问题的界定者、问题是如何引起政府官员的注意的以及由谁用什么办法来解决问题等密切相关。闹大是透视公共治理状况的一面镜子。对闹大的描述性分析有助于深入把握和理解当前我国公共治理的规律和逻辑。     

Bringing Social Norms Back In

This article gives a rationalistic, individualistic explanation of social norms. Two different explanatory models for aggregate social phenomena are presented. It is argued that the emergence of such norms can be given a kind of socio-cultural evolutionary explanation, with boundedly rational actors, in social interaction situations having the characteristics of community. Their maintenance in larger settings, however, require that they are internalized into behavioral habits. These results, it is argued, are relevant for several fields of political science.     

Educational Attainment and Social Norms of Voting

Political Behavior - Why does the likelihood of voting increase with education in the US? Prominent theories attribute education’s effect to human capital, which affords individuals resources...     

Immigrant-Serving Non-profit Voter Mobilization in Off-Cycle Elections: An Institutional Explanation of Differential Political Participation Patterns

Abstract

Immigrants in the USA tend to vote less than other groups, and immigrants vote at even lower levels during off-cycle elections. The aim of this article is to analyse whether these same patterns can be observed in the electoral activities of non-profit organizations that represent immigrants. I argue for a theory of reflective non-profit representation to explain how immigrant-serving organizations make decisions about electoral activities. By analysing original survey data collected in 2012 and 2013, the article finds that immigrant-serving non-profits are less likely to mobilize immigrants in off-cycle compared to on-cycle elections, and less likely to mobilize voters than organizations serving other communities. These findings suggest that immigrant voting could increase if non-profits increased their political involvement, reimagined their identities to include politics as a part of their mission, and generated new revenues to support these activities.     

The Puzzle of Gender-equal Political Participation in Sweden: The Importance of Norms and Mobilization

Political participation is higher among men than women in most parts of the world. However, earlier research has shown that this does not hold true in Scandinavia, including Sweden, where gender differences are remarkably small. This article studies the causes of the Swedish situation. A conventional hypothesis is formulated based on research from other parts of the world. It assumes that gender-equal participation in Sweden can be explained by the lack of gender differences in certain political resource and motivational factors that are often analyzed. However, this hypothesis is not supported by the data, which instead indicates a female disadvantage with regard to both resources and motivation. Two alternative hypotheses are developed and shown as empirically viable. The first assumes that women more often adhere to norms that emphasize the importance of being politically active, which promotes their participation in politics. The second focuses on collective mobilization based on interests specific to women. In line with this hypothesis, only women are shown to be members of women's organizations and hold more radical opinions on issues related to gender equality and reproduction. These factors have a positive impact on women's participation, and together they explain a noticeable amount of the male advantage with regard to conventional explanatory factors. Therefore they are important contributory causes of gender-equal participation in Sweden, although other factors, not discussed here, also contribute. Quantitative methods are used in the analyses, and the study material is the 1997 Swedish Citizenship Survey.     

Social Norms and the Paradox of Elections’ Turnout

People vote although their marginal gain from voting is zero.We contribute to the resolution of this paradox by presentinga model for equilibrium configuration of attitudes regardingthe decision to vote. Each individual is seen as an element ofa social network, within which pairs of individuals expressideas and attitudes, exerting mutual influence. We model therole of such networks in propagating the mutual influenceacross pairs of individuals. We show that it may suffice thata small set of individuals have a strong feeling about showingup to vote to generate a significant turnout in elections.     

Social and Economic Determinants of English Voter Choice in the 1997 General Election

Using a theoretical framework in which voters' choicesare the result of utility maximisation decisions, andin which the variation of utility functions acrossindividuals is partly deterministic (depending ontheir socio-economic characteristics) and partlystochastic, we estimate constituency-level regressionequations to explain how the electoral shares of eachof the main parties depend on conditions in theconstituency. Whilst social characteristics appear tohave an impact similar to that predicted in theexisting literature, economic conditions appear tohave played a very different role in 1997 from inprevious elections.     

Explaining Social Class Inequality in Voter Turnout: The Contribution of Income and Health

Occupation‐based social class is an important, yet under‐explored, factor in electoral participation. In this article, social class differences in voter turnout over time are measured, and how two other resources – namely income and health – mediate or modify this relationship is analysed. The analysis is based on an individual‐level register‐based 11 percent sample of the entire electorate in the 1999 Finnish parliamentary elections, and secondarily on smaller register‐based samples in the 2012 presidential and municipal elections. Results show that income mediates part of the effects of social class on voting, while social class and utilised health indicators exert mainly independent effects on turnout. Social class differences remain largely stable in all income and hospital care groups, except that no differences between classes are observed among those most severely affected by health problems. Results are also mostly similar between those of working age and the older population, and between men and women, and remain stable over time and in different types of elections. The findings imply that social class should be taken account in theoretical and empirical models of turnout.     

Influenza and Voter Turnout

Disease makes performing civic obligations more difficult both for the afflicted and those around them. Elections held when infectious diseases are locally prevalent are therefore likely to see lower voter turnout than are those held in healthier times. This is especially notable given the strongly seasonal incidence of influenza, which coincides with election season in some countries. This article examines the relationship between regional turnout rates in Finland and the United States from 1995 to 2015 with measures of local influenza prevalence. In both countries, regression models suggest influenza outbreaks associate with lower voting rates. This may suggest another mechanism limiting the political representation of people and communities vulnerable to ill health.     

从能力到主体:社会动员研究的话语转向

国家对农民的社会动员能力研究是一种典型的转型话语,是社会由计划体制向市场体制转型的产物.在市场经济体制基本确立的背景下,转型话语将被市场体制话语取代,社会动员研究的焦点将从社会动员能力问题转向社会动员主体问题.社会动员研究话语的转向将使我们把现实关注点转向对社会动员主体的认同与培育.     

Voter sincerity and the time-of-voting-decision

This article explores the relationship between vote sincerity and the time at which vote decisions are finalized. It posits that a specific set of competitive circumstances are necessary for insincere voting to occur, and that voters' understanding of these circumstances can be influenced by exposure to information during a campaign. The article introduces a new method of operationalizing a commonly overlooked type of insincere voting: the protest voter. As defined here, protest voters express their political dissatisfaction by supporting an uncompetitive non-traditional party that is not their first preference. Canadian Election Study data reveal that protest voters make up a small, but noteworthy segment of the electorate and that insincere voters tend to make their vote decisions relatively late.     

Voter Turnout in Norway: Time, Space, and Causality

This article focuses on diachronic and synchronic variation in Norwegian electoral turnout from 1945 to 1991. The model contains aggregate data divided into two-year intervals with regions as cross-sections. The impact of both socio-economic and political variables is tested. The two-dimensional view on turnout variation makes it possible to distinguish between short-term and long-term effects, as well as between national versus local factors. In contrast to related studies, this analysis actually tests for causality relationships between different political variables. The empirical results indicate that an increase in either national unemployment or regional income contributes to an increase in turnout rates. Electoral participation is also positively related to Labour support, industrial employment and strike activity.     

Ancestry Culture,Assimilation, and Voter Turnout in Two Generations

Political Behavior - Women vote less than men in many parts of the world. Whether this gender gap is due to cultural preferences stemming from traditional gender norms or to structural constraints...     

Biases at the Ballot Box: How Multiple Forms of Voter Discrimination Impede the Descriptive and Substantive Representation of Ethnic Minority Groups

Political Behavior - Research shows that ethnic minority candidates often face an electoral penalty at the ballot box. In this study, we argue that this penalty depends on both candidate and voter...     

Civic Duty and Voter Turnout

We argue that two different sets of considerations shape the decision to vote or abstain in an election–ethical and non-ethical. First the citizen may vote out of a sense of duty. Failing that, she may vote because she has strong preferences about the outcome of the election. Abstention occurs when neither duty nor a sufficiently strong preference is present. The implication is that while duty and preference each have strong positive effects on turnout, they also have a negative interaction effect, since the impact of preference is much weaker among those with a sense of duty. We present a wide array of empirical evidence that systematically supports our claim that the turnout decision is importantly shaped by this causal heterogeneity. Thus a turnout model misses something fundamental if it does not take into account the effect of civic duty.