peer pressure

Here's an interesting writeup in the Washington Post of a 2006 Green and Gerber study showing that public shame may be the highest motivator for civic participation. I'm not kidding.

Here are the results of Gerber and Green's experiment, in which a controlled sample of voters were matched up against groups that received four different messages about an upcoming election:

"These were the most homely pieces of direct mail in the history of direct mail," said Green, who works at Yale University. "They were sheets of computer paper. They had no graphics and used block courier type. They are the exact opposite of the slick four-color mailings that campaigns send out."

Homely though they were, the letters had a powerful effect. The control group's turnout rate was slightly less than 30 percent. Among those who received the "civic pride" letter, turnout was 6 percent higher than the control group's. Among those who were told they were being studied, it was 12 percent higher. Among those who were shown whether they had voted in the previous election, the turnout was 16 percent higher.

And telling people what everyone in the neighborhood had done the previous Election Day -- and letting them know that they would be similarly informed about the current election -- boosted turnout by 27 percent.

Shame and publicity - peer pressure - can be a powerful motivator, it seems. And when the government/campaign/party is going to snitch on you, people get their butts out to vote.

The effectiveness of snitching on neighbors exceeded that of live telephone calls and rivaled that of laborious, face-to-face canvassing, the political scientists wrote in an article published in the American Political Science Review this year. Direct mail costs peanuts compared with other techniques.

Interestingly, Green and Gerber trace the decline in voting among Americans of all ages to the rise of the secret ballot. Their theory: voting used to be a very public and social act. Once those social bonds were severed, turnout declined:

Elections in the mid-19th century were festive affairs, and people gathered to carouse, jostle one another and vote. They sometimes cast their ballots on a stage to cheers and jeers. Voting, even their choice of candidates, used to be extremely public.

A series of progressive reforms in the late 19th century turned voting into a private affair. Campaign operatives were kept clear of polling stations. People got to vote in secret, and few knew whether their neighbors voted.

Turnout plummeted.

What this suggests is that, besides civic pride and political conviction, a central reason people vote is that democratic participation is an intensely social act. Politics, candidates and campaigns offer us zones of connection with other citizens -- even our political opponents. It gives millions of people common topics of conversation.

It's too late to really incorporate this kind of messaging into a campaign, but it raises some interesting possibilities for the 2010 midterms.

Update - I can't get the video to stop playing when the page loads, so I stuck it below the fold.