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What are the consequences of political campaigns for mass participation? Despite extensive research on individual campaign tactics and cumulative campaign spending totaling billions of dollars, we do not yet understand the aggregate effects of an entire campaign on voter participation. In this paper, we take advantage of geographic discontinuities in campaigning and use new data on voters and campaigns to show that, in the aggregate, campaign efforts have large effects on voter turnout, causing the participation of millions of voters who would otherwise not have participated, and significantly altering the size and shape of the voting population.
A modern presidential campaign spends over one billion dollars to run hundreds of thousands of television advertisements and attempt hundreds of millions of individual voter contacts. But there is reason to believe this massive effort has negligible or small effects on voter participation. Television advertising appears to have no substantively significant effect on turnout (e.g., Krasno and Green 2008). Isolated campaign efforts can increase voter participation, but the substantive size of these effects is usually small. Green, McGrath and Aronow (2013) pool evidence from more than 200 get-out-the-vote (GOTV) experiments—published and unpublished—to show that, on average, door-to-door canvassing increases turnout by 1.0 percentage point, direct mail increases turnout by 0.7 percentage points, and phone calls increase turnout by 0.4 percentage points. 1 Previous research also suggests that individual variation in turnout is largely explained by non-campaign factors, such as individual utility (Riker and Ordeshook 1968), social pressure (Gerber, Green and Larimer 2008), resources (Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995), or personality (Gerber et al. 2011), suggesting that the effects of large campaigns should be minimal.
With this research in mind, one might conclude that campaigns have a negligible effect on aggregate voter turnout. However, the tactics of campaigns have recently changed, with modern campaigns increasingly using scientifically tested, individual-level targeting (Issenberg 2013; Hersh 2015). In particular, the sheer scale of individual voter contact has increased dramatically over the past few presidential elections. These changes in tactics and resource allocation may have increased the ability of campaigns to mobilize voters. 2
The GOTV experiments cited above do little to inform us about the aggregate effects of a modern campaign using these new methods, where targeted voters are potentially contacted dozens...