Volunteer Phone Calls Can Increase Turnout

Abstract

Gerber and Green argue that get-out-the-vote phone calls do not increase turnout based upon field experiments testing nonpartisan professional phone banks. This article argues that the quality of the phone calls matter and that brief, nonpartisan phone calls can raise voter turnout if they are sufficiently personal. To test this hypothesis, a series of eight volunteer nonpartisan phone campaigns to mobilize voters were studied using randomized, controlled experiments. The campaigns targeted voters across six different cities in 2000 and 2001. Contra Gerber and Green, the phone calls are found to boost turnout 3.8 percentage points. Based on these estimates, volunteer phone calls produce one vote for every $26 per vote, which is cost competitive with door-to-door canvassing. Differences between the professional phone banks previously studied by Gerber and Green and the volunteer phone banks herein are also discussed.