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We report the results of a randomized field experiment involving approximately 30,000 registered voters in New Haven, Connecticut. Nonpartisan get-out-the-vote messages were conveyed through personal canvassing direct mail, and telephone calls shortly before the November 1998 election.
A variety of substantive messages were used. Voter turnout was increased substantially by personal canvassing slightly by direct mail, and not at all by telephone calls. These findings support our hypothesis that the long-term retrenchment in voter turnout is partly attributable to the decline in face-to face political mobilization.
During the last half-century, a dramatic transformation has occurred in the manner in which voters are mobilized. The election campaigns described by Gosnell (1937), Sayre and Kaufman (1960, chap. 6), and Wolfinger (1974, chap. 4) relied heavily on face-to-face contact between voters and those seeking their support. Notably absent from such accounts are professional campaign consultants, direct mail vendors, and commercial phone banks, all of which have gradually replaced work performed by party activists. The advent of modern campaign tactics (Broder 1971; Ware 1985) has coincided with a decline in the proportion of adults who report working for a political party. Based on an annual aggregation of Roper surveys between 1973 and 1994, Putnam (2000, 41) reports a steady decline in this proportion: Whereas 6% of the public reported working for a political party in the early 1970s, just 3% did so in the mid-1990s.
At the same time, there has been a marked decline in the size and vitality of nonpartisan organizations. In the mid-1960s, 2.4 of every 1,000 women over the age of 20 belonged to the League of Women Voters, compared to .79 in 1998 (Putnam 2000, 438-44). A similar fate has befallen such civic organizations as the Lions, Rotary, and Kiwanis Clubs, which have experienced sharp membership declines since the 1960s. Due to the changing character of both partisan and nonpartisan organizations, voter mobilization has become increasingly impersonal, and messages that once might have been delivered in person are now communicated using mass marketing techniques.
The decline of personal mobilization has arguably contributed to the erosion of voter turnout in the United States since the 1960s. This hypothesis is related to, yet distinct from, Rosenstone and Hansen's (1993) contention that diminishing rates of...