Who benefits from appeals to vote? Evidence from a get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaign in India

Somdeep Chatterjee () and Manhar Manchanda ()
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Somdeep Chatterjee: Economics Group Indian Institute of Management Calcutta
Manhar Manchanda: Economics Group Indian Institute of Management Calcutta

Public Choice, 2025, vol. 204, issue 3, No 9, 483-527

Abstract: Abstract Get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns are fairly popular as a policy instrument to increase democratic participation and voter turnout. While most GOTV drives target individual voters by nudging them to vote, little is known about the impacts of generalized group-based GOTV appeals on the electorate. A particularly popular form of GOTV messaging involves ‘descriptive norm’ appeals which are broadly of two types. The first is a positive frame encouraging turnout, given that peers have voted in large numbers. The second is a negative frame, which seeks higher participation as compensation for low turnout by peer voters. We exploit a unique GOTV intervention from the Indian state of Gujarat, where the independent and autonomous election administration of India made such a negatively framed descriptive norm plea to nearly 25 million voters to come out in large numbers and cast their votes in the subsequent phase of the election. We use a synthetic difference-in-differences (SDiD) econometric technique to estimate the causal effects of this GOTV appeal on voter turnout and vote shares. We find evidence of a resultant decline in voter turnout, which we support with a theoretical model and vignette-based evidence that voters attach a disutility to being told what to do and that such appeals are ineffective in credibly signaling the desirability of voting.

Keywords: GOTV; Elections; Expressive voting; Synthetic DiD; D72; O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s11127-024-01253-2

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