October 29, 2010 – 9:41 am
You don’t have to use heavyhanded, intimidating factors to make social pressure work. You can raise turnout dramatically just by subtly reminding people that they’re being watched. Here’s a few things we know about voter turnout: The urban poor don’t vote. Voter turnout experiments don’t typically focus on non-voting populations like the urban poor. Turnout [...]
October 28, 2010 – 9:32 am
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. 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 [...]
RSS