Election-Campaign Law

Tennessee Tribune replicates ?Social pressure and voter turnout?

By Michael Alvarez

I learned this morning that a Nashville-area newspaper had published a list of voters who registered to vote in the last presidential election, but who have never voted. You can go to the Tennessee Tribune website and download the published list yourself.

What is interesting about this Tennessee Tribune project is that it appears to implement something very similar to a field experiment that Alan Gerber, Donald Green, Christopher Larimer recently published in the American Political Science Review, “Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment.” One of the things that Gerber, Green, and Larimer found in that paper was that “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.”

It’ll be fascinating to see if the experimental findings for Gerber, Green and Larimer are replicated in the Tennessee Tribune’s efforts.

Full post as published by Election Updates on October 16, 2008 (boomark / email).