Calling All Neighbors: Mobilizing Turnout for a Local Housing Referendum

Abstract

Existing political science and marketing scholarship suggests that a get-out-the-vote (GOTV) message focused on a neighborhood or not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) issue will be more powerful than a basic GOTV script. However, randomized field experiments testing different scripts have found either minimal script effects or that neighbor scripts are less effective at moving voters to the polls. Here, we take advantage of a local vote on a NIMBY issue—approval of a zoning exemption for a low-income senior housing development—to test the effectiveness of reaching out to registered voters as members of a neighborhood. Consistent with prior work, we find that a basic GOTV message is more effective in increasing turnout; however, we also find that the neighbor message is more effective among some subgroups of voters, including those living farther away from the proposed development.