Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy

Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons

No 27433, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, canvassers supporting the candidates' list, or to a control group. While canvassers’ visits increased turnout by 1.8 percentage points, candidates’ had no impact on participation. Candidates increased their own vote share in the precincts they canvassed, but only at the expense of other candidates on the list. This suggests that their failure to mobilize nonvoters resulted from focusing on securing the preferences of active voters.

JEL-codes: C93 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur, nep-exp and nep-pol
Note: POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Published as Enrico Cantoni & Vincent Pons, 2021. "Do interactions with candidates increase voter support and participation? Experimental evidence from Italy," Economics & Politics, vol 33(2), pages 379-402.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27433.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do interactions with candidates increase voter support and participation? Experimental evidence from Italy (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27433

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27433

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).