Detail of an election mailer sent to residents of St. Paul. Photo by Max Nesterak/Minnesota Reformer.
The election is less than a week away, which means it’s time for those off-putting get-out-the-vote mailers that remind people their voting history is part of the public record.
“We’re sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to share who does and does not vote in an effort to promote election participation,” as one mailing told some Twin Cities residents this week. “We will be reviewing these records after the election to determine whether or not you joined your neighbors in voting.”
The mailers, often from generic sounding groups like the “Center for Voting Information” and the “Voter Participation Center,” adopt that vaguely menacing tattletale tone for a reason: Research has shown, over and over again, that it works.
The foundational study on this was published in the American Political Science Review in 2008. Researchers investigated the efficacy of various get-out-the-vote messaging on people in 180,000 households in Michigan during the August 2006 primary election. The households were randomly assigned to receive different mailers, with a control group receiving no mailing at all.
Turnout was 29.7% among the control group. People receiving a flier emphasizing a generic “civic duty” to vote were slightly more likely to participate, with 31.5% turnout. Reminding people of their own turnout history, by listing their own voting record, boosted participation to 34.5%.
But the most effective intervention was listing the turnout history of household residents — and their neighbors as well. The turnout rate among that group was 37.8%, a more than 8 percentage point boost relative to the control.
“It is important to underscore the magnitude of these effects,” the authors note. “The 8.1 percentage-point effect is not only bigger than any mail effect gauged by a randomized experiment; it exceeds the effect of live phone calls and rivals the effect of face-to-face contact with canvassers conducting get-out-the-vote campaigns.”
Subsequent studies have replicated and bolstered those findings. Among other things, researchers have found:
- Similar effects in the context of a contested recall election;
- enduring effects that extend to campaigns taking place a year or more after the initial mailing;
- that activating peoples’ sense of shame over not voting is usually more effective than appealing to their pride;
- and that even less heavy-handed social pressure messages are effective at changing voter behavior.
That sense of discomfort people feel upon opening one of these mailers is a big part of why they work: The messages make an impression, unlike the generic calls to action that fade away in the background noise of a busy campaign.
While records of whether or not a person has voted are public in many states, how they voted is never made public. However, that hasn’t stopped some groups from wrongly suggesting otherwise.
“Although we are not advocates of shaming tactics or policies, their cost-effectiveness makes them an inevitable development in political campaign craft,” the authors of the 2008 study wrote.
Judging by the continued prevalence of these messages 16 years later, it appears that political consultants took the findings to heart.