A Digital Field Experiment Reveals Large Effects of Friend-to-Friend Texting on Voter Turnout

Inaccurate forecasting of a randomized controlled trial

“…The reasoning underlying this hypothesis is that field experiments in the domain of political participation are well known for low compliance. Field experiments about electoral turnout, for instance, generally elicit compliance rates of only about 25% (Schein et al, 2020), and those that use ICT to elicit political engagement generate compliance rates in the single digits (see Table A1 in Golden, Gulzar and Sonnet (2023)). Although high compliance rates by no means guarantee significant ITT effects, low compliance substantially undermines the likelihood that an intervention will generate significant treatment effects (see Gerber and Green (2012), ch.…”

Mobilizing party activism: A field experiment with party members and sympathizers

“…Direct mobilization is the process by which parties and leaders "contact citizens personally and encourage them to take action" (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993, 26). Parties are more likely to directly contact people they already know and that are more likely to vote for them: their core supporters.Contact can happens via traditional means such as the telephone, and increasingly also via digital channels, for instance email (Hager et al 2020) or smartphone apps (Schein et al 2020). While parties increasingly contact party members and supporters via digital means, this has not replaced, but gone hand-in-hand with an expansion of in-person organising (McKenna and Han 2014;Jungherr et al 2020).…”

Do text messages increase voter registration? Evidence from RCTs with a local authority and an advocacy organisation in the UK

“…Bennion and Nickerson (2011) show that ''warm'' text messages, sent to individuals who received registration forms by e-mail before, can increase voter registration in the USA, while Harris et al (2021) find mixed results in Kenya: text message reminders did not increase voter registrations on their own, but had a small effect when delivered alongside an intervention that made registrations more easily accessible locally. Based on Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) experiments that identify positive effects of text messages on turnout (Malhotra et al, 2011;Dale and Strauss, 2009;Schein et al, 2020;Bergh et al, 2016), there are good reasons to believe that they should also be effective at increasing registration, given that voter registration in the UK can be completed online in less than five minutes.…”