Using social pressure to get out the vote

There is a cool article in the new American Political Science Review reporting the results of a field experiment in which different mailings were randomly sent to voters. It turns out that making voting turnout public knowledge has a dramatic effect on turnout -- here's the abstract:

American Political Science Review (2008), 102:33-48
Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment
Alan S. Gerber, Donald P. Green, and Christopher W. Larimer

Voter turnout theories based on rational self-interested behavior generally fail to predict significant turnout unless they account for the utility that citizens receive from performing their civic duty. We distinguish between two aspects of this type of utility, intrinsic satisfaction from behaving in accordance with a norm and extrinsic incentives to comply, and test the effects of priming intrinsic motives and applying varying degrees of extrinsic pressure. A large-scale field experiment involving several hundred thousand registered voters used a series of mailings to gauge these effects. Substantially higher turnout was observed among those who received mailings promising to publicize their turnout to their household or their neighbors. These findings demonstrate the profound importance of social pressure as an inducement to political participation.

Here's the key passage reporting their results, which show an eight percentage point increase in turnout from one mailing:

Here's a sample mailing:

While this might seem a little creepy, voting records are public information. It's important to remember that voting was an act performed in public before the Progressive Era -- a period when turnout was much higher than it is today.

Comments

[Rob]

Beyond the scope of the article is the question whether increased voter turnout is a positive good (though the tone of the article suggests that the authors feel it is). I'd respectfully suggest that voters who need social pressure to get themselves to the polls are far more likely than more motivated voters to have little or no knowledge of the issues and little or no interest in the outcome of the election. Their votes are far more likely to be based on arbitrary criteria like ethnicity or appearance of the candidates and misinformation about the candidates and their positions. Is this the cohort we want deciding close elections?

[Seth]

I like this idea on two fronts: (1) incentivizing participation in the electoral process, and (2) a means of identifying voter fraud.

Of course we'd need some serious electoral reforms: for one, no more voting during the work week, move that to the weekends, or better yet allow voting all week. Allow same day registration, no reason absentee voting, etc.

When I was in Australia they had compulsory voting.