Street fight: The impact of a street sign campaign on voter turnout

Abstract

Over the past two decades, there has been a resurgence in the use of field experimental methods to examine the impact of a range of get-out-the-vote tactics (Green and Gerber, 2008), continuing a tradition that dates as far back as Gosnell (1927). Scholars have investigated the impact of face-to-face canvassing, direct mail, phone calls, leafleting, and mass media (Green and Gerber, 2008), yet no field experiment of which we are aware has tested the impact of a street sign campaign on voter mobilization. This study reports the first randomized field experiment gauging the effects of a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote street sign campaign. The experiment we describe is essentially a matched-pair, cluster-randomized design conducted in the context of the November 2005 municipal elections in New York City. We identified 14 pairs of poll sites (voting locations) that were closely matched in terms of past voter turnout. One poll site in each pair was randomly assigned to be exposed to the treatment that encouraged voters to vote on the day before Election Day. The street sign intervention is found to produce higher turnout.