The first edition of Get Out the Vote! broke ground by introducing a new scientific approach to the challenge of voter mobilization and profoundly influenced how campaigns operate. In this expanded and updated edition, the authors incorporate data from more than one hundred new studies, which shed new light on the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of various campaign tactics, including door-to-door canvassing, e-mail, direct mail, and telephone calls. Two new chapters focus on the effectiveness of mass media campaigns and events such as candidate forums and Election Day festivals. Available in time for the core of the 2008 presidential campaign, this practical guide on voter mobilization is sure to be an important resource for consultants, candidates, and grassroots organizations. Praise for the first edition: "Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber have studied turnout for years. Their findings, based on dozens of controlled experiments done as part of actual campaigns, are summarized in a slim and readable new book called Get Out the Vote!, which is bound to become a bible for politicians and activists of all stripes." —Alan B. Kreuger, in the New York Times "Get Out the Vote! shatters conventional wisdom about GOTV." —Hal Malchow in Campaigns & Elections "Green and Gerber's recent book represents important innovations in the study of turnout."—Political Science Review "Green and Gerber have provided a valuable resource for grassroots campaigns across the spectrum."—National Journal

A powerful new research design in the field of voter mobilization has created a more comprehensive picture of the effectiveness of various get-out-the-vote campaign methods. With an increase in field experiments in the past few years, researchers, campaigns, and policymakers have gleaned important insights into voter participation. Until recently, voting behavior was mainly studied through survey research. And while large national surveys have had a tremendous impact on scientific and policy debates, concerns about the accuracy of survey research remain. Surveys suffer from two major drawbacks. First is the possibility of misreporting by survey participants. Measuring voter turnout through survey research relies on respondents' disclosure of whether they voted or not, and some voters may feel embarrassed that they did not vote and provide false answers. Second, campaigns may focus their energies on likely voters. If so, surveys may show a correlation between voter turnout and voter mobilization activity even when voter mobilization campaigns are ineffective. Aware of the limitations of survey research, political scientists have recently turned to field experimentation to gain a clearer picture of the causal implications of voter mobilization efforts on specific populations. This issue of The ANNALS presents the results of several field experiments, which are at the forefront of research in this area. These field experiments draw important distinctions between different forms of mobilization activities and their effects on a variety of populations – studying personal versus impersonal mobilization efforts as well as partisan versus non-partisan efforts. Challenging conventional wisdom and clarifying important methodological issues, this issue of The ANNALS provides a new approach to the study of voter mobilization. Taken together, these intriguing articles report advances in knowledge gained by field experiments and have the potential to reshape the past assumptions about campaign effectiveness and influence future strategies on mobilizing voters. This issue will also serve as a springboard for new work in the field as political scientists grapple with filling in existing gaps – such as the effects of mass media – and move toward an even clearer theoretical understanding of the conditions under which interventions work. Professionals, volunteers and anyone directly involved in voter mobilization will discover important findings in this collection of studies. And, because the research was conducted in the real world of campaigns and elections, the authors help answer the critical question of how to apply scholarly insights to voter outreach programs on a grand scale.

This book develops and empirically tests a social theory of political participation. It overturns prior understandings of why some people (such as college-degree holders, churchgoers and citizens in national rather than local elections) vote more often than others. The book shows that the standard demographic variables are not proxies for variation in the individual costs and benefits of participation, but for systematic variation in the patterns of social ties between potential voters. Potential voters who move in larger social circles, particularly those including politicians and other mobilizing actors, have more access to the flurry of electoral activity prodding citizens to vote and increasing political discussion. Treating voting as a socially defined practice instead of as an individual choice over personal payoffs, a social theory of participation is derived from a mathematical model with behavioral foundations that is empirically calibrated and tested using multiple methods and data sources.

The solution to youth voter turnout requires focus on helping young people follow through on their political interests and intentions.

Elections are the means by which democratic nations determine their leaders, and communication in the context of elections has the potential to shape people's beliefs, attitudes, and actions. Thus, electoral persuasion is one of the most important political processes in any nation that regularly holds elections. Moreover, electoral persuasion encompasses not only what happens in an election but also what happens before and after, involving candidates, parties, interest groups, the media, and the voters themselves. This volume surveys the vast political science literature on this subject, emphasizing contemporary research and topics and encouraging cross-fertilization among research strands. A global roster of authors provides a broad examination of electoral persuasion, with international perspectives complementing deep coverage of U.S. politics. Major areas of coverage include: general models of political persuasion; persuasion by parties, candidates, and outside groups; media influence; interpersonal influence; electoral persuasion across contexts; and empirical methodologies for understanding electoral persuasion.

Which get out the vote efforts actually succeed in ethnoracial communities, and why? Analyzing the results from hundreds of original experiments, the authors of this book offer a persuasive new theory to explain why some methods work while others do not. Exploring and comparing a wide variety of efforts targeting ethnoracial voters, the authors present a new theoretical frame: the social cognition model of voting, based on an individual's sense of civic identity, for understanding get out the vote effectiveness. Their book serves as a guide for political practitioners, for it offers concrete strategies to employ in developing future mobilization efforts.

Using a combination of existing and original research, this new text provides a simple explanation for the low turnout in American elections: rather than creating an environment conducive to participation, the institutional arrangements that govern structure participation, representation, and actual governance in the United States create an environment that discourages widespread participation. To explore this argument, the author examines the origins and development of registration laws, single-member districts, such as the Electoral College, and the separation of powers and the impact these institutions have on turnout levels in American national elections. To this end, the text employs a narrative discussing the impact of institutions on turnout in the United States and across nations, supported with extensive yet accessible data analysis. Hill not only provides students with explanations for the low turnout characteristic of American elections, but also demonstrates the powerful impact of institutions on political life.

Voting is a habit. People learn the habit of voting, or not, based on experience in their first few elections. Elections that do not stimulate high turnout among young adults leave a 'footprint' of low turnout in the age structure of the electorate as many individuals who were new at those elections fail to vote at subsequent elections. Elections that stimulate high turnout leave a high turnout footprint. So a country's turnout history provides a baseline for current turnout that is largely set, except for young adults. This baseline shifts as older generations leave the electorate and as changes in political and institutional circumstances affect the turnout of new generations. Among the changes that have affected turnout in recent years, the lowering of the voting age in most established democracies has been particularly important in creating a low turnout footprint that has grown with each election.

Who Votes Now? compares the demographic characteristics and political views of voters and nonvoters in American presidential elections since 1972 and examines how electoral reforms and the choices offered by candidates influence voter turnout. Drawing on a wealth of data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey and the American National Election Studies, Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler demonstrate that the rich have consistently voted more than the poor for the past four decades, and that voters are substantially more conservative in their economic views than nonvoters. They find that women are now more likely to vote than men, that the gap in voting rates between blacks and whites has largely disappeared, and that older Americans continue to vote more than younger Americans. Leighley and Nagler also show how electoral reforms such as Election Day voter registration and absentee voting have boosted voter turnout, and how turnout would also rise if parties offered more distinct choices. Providing the most systematic analysis available of modern voter turnout, Who Votes Now? reveals that persistent class bias in turnout has enduring political consequences, and that it really does matter who votes and who doesn't.

On voting behavior in the United States