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Members of the same household share similar voting behaviors on average, but how much of this correlation can be attributed to the behavior of the other person in the household? Disentangling and isolating the unique effects of peer behavior, selection processes, and congruent interests is a challenge for all studies of interpersonal influence. This study proposes and utilizes a carefully designed placebo-controlled experimental protocol to overcome this identification problem. During a face-to-face canvassing experiment targeting households with two registered voters, residents who answered the door were exposed to either a Get Out the Vote message (treatment) or a recycling pitch (placebo). The turnout of the person in the household not answering the door allows for contagion to be measured. Both experiments find that 60% of the propensity to vote is passed onto the other member of the household. This finding suggests a mechanism by which civic participation norms are adopted and couples grow more similar over time.
The entire act of voting appears to be assisted by interactions with friends, neighbors, and family members. Voters rely on one another to become informed about elections (Robinson 1976). Friends and neighbors encourage one another to go to the polls on Election Day (McClurg 2004). People in social networks encourage one another to support particular candidates (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1991). Unfortunately, an inability to disentangle influence from other factors places the entire literature on a shaky empirical foundation. Likeminded individuals with similar habits, customs, and stations in life gravitate toward one another to populate neighborhoods and social networks (Mutz and Martin 2001). Once individuals are located in a network, members of the network are often exposed to identical outside pressures that alter behaviors and beliefs. Using observational data, there is no method of separating the unique effect of contagion from selection processes, congruence of material interests, or exposure to external forces without making nontrivial assumptions. Thus, the magnitude of contagion effects in voting behavior is uncertain.
This identification problem is not limited to voting behavior and permeates nearly every study invoking interpersonal processes. Whether one is studying civic engagement (Putnam 2000), criminal activity (Anderson 1990), volunteerism (Wilson and Musick 1997), protests (Lohman 1994), riots (Myers 1997), revolutions (Tilly 1978), or even suicide (Pickering and Walford 2000), distinguishing...