Is Door-to-Door Canvassing Effective in Europe? Evidence from a Meta-study across Six European Countries

Yosef Bhatti,Kasper M. Hansen,Jonas Hedegaard Hansen,Jens Olav Dahlgaard

doi:10.1017/s0007123416000521

Abstract

A vast amount of experimental evidence suggests that get-out-the-vote encouragements delivered through door-to-door canvassing have large effects on turnout. Most of the existing studies have been conducted in the United States, and are inspiring European mobilization campaigns. This article explores the empirical question of whether the American findings are applicable to Europe. It combines existing European studies and presents two new Danish studies to show that the pooled point estimate of the effect is substantially smaller in Europe than in the United States, and finds no effects in the two Danish experiments. The article discusses why the effects seem to be different in Europe compared to the United States, and stresses the need for further experiments in Europe as there is still considerable uncertainty regarding the European effects. While one possible explanation is that differences in turnout rates explain the differences in effect sizes, the empirical analysis finds no strong relationship between turnout and effect sizes in either Europe or the United States.

Highlights

To what extent do campaigns to increase voter turnout affect the likelihood of participation? This question has received considerable attention in the academic literature, especially since Gerber and Green’s seminal field experiments in New Haven, Connecticut.1 Perhaps one of the most studied mobilization tools is door-to-door canvassing, which is widely used in US campaigns.2 In a recent review of the literature, Green, McGrath and Aronow3 identified seventy-one canvassing experiments with a precision-weighted average complier average causal effect (CACE)4 of 2.536 percentage points and a 95 per cent credible interval of (1.817, 3.255)
While one possible explanation is that differences in turnout rates explain the differences in effect sizes, the empirical analysis finds no strong relationship between turnout and effect sizes in either Europe or the United States
A few published studies have focused on the effectiveness of door-to-door canvassing outside the United States

Summary

Existing Literature

The only published study that examines the effectiveness of door-to-door canvassing in Europe is John and Brannan’s17 study of the 2005 British general election. The experiment included 2,510 individuals and found an intention-to-treat (ITT) effect of 3.6 percentage points for the non-partisan canvassing and a CACE of 6.7, with a standard error of 3.7. Morales and Jiménez-Buedo conducted a partisan campaign in the Spanish city of Murcia during the 2011 local elections They found negative treatment effects, though the exact size of the CACE is unclear due to uncertainty about the compliance rate. A recent study of the 2014 European Parliament election in Sweden analyzes partisan canvassing among 10,897 individuals.22 It demonstrates an ITT effect of 2.3 percentage points and a CACE of 3.6 percentage points with a standard error of 1.9. Voters who received a leaflet and an attempt was made to contact them were 3.7 percentage points less likely to vote than voters in the control group They estimate a CACE of −8.5 percentage points and a standard error of 4.3.24. When we convert the ITTs to the CACEs27 and weigh them by their precision, we get a pooled CACE of 2.7 percentage points with a standard error of 1.7

New Studies from Denmark

Total N

Study Reference

Control group turnout

Findings

DISCUSSION