David Nickerson sent me the following message:

I saw your post from February 3rd complaining about the lack of
connection between social networks and voter turnout. I’m just finishing up my dissertation in political science at Yale (under Don Green) before starting at Notre Dame next year. The dissertation is on behavioral contagion and a couple of chapters look at voter turnout. Attached is one chapter describing a randomized field experiment I conducted to determine how the degree to which voting is contagious within a household. You might find it of interest (though the network involved is fairly small).

I’m also working with Dean Karlan (from Princeton economics) to
broaden the scope of contagion experiments to see whether voting is
contagious across households (and if so, how far). We’re at the beginning stages of the research, but think it might be fruitful.

At the very least, I’m approaching the topic from a very different
direction from Meredith Rolfe (whose work looks interesting). I thought you’d be interested to see that at least one other graduate student is working on linking social networks to voting behavior.

David’s paper describes an experiment in which persons in two-adult households are randomly encouraged to vote or not, and then they see (a) whether the other adult in the household votes also. The rough estimate is that the effect on the spouses/roommates is about half that on the persons directly contacted by the experimenter. So presumably some communication is going on. There’s an interesting discussion near the end of the paper about how these effects could be important as the “contagion” spreads through the population.

He fits some two-stage least squares models–actually, these confuse me (as usual), especially since the exclusion restriction is hard to believe in this setting.

After he sent me the paper, we had the following email exchange:

AG:thanks for the chapter–this is interesting. i’ve always been skeptical of the “neighbors convince neighbors” model of opinion change, although i guess this is a little different because you’re talking about turnout.

my own anecdote on this is that when i was living in berkeley, calif, i once talked my roommate into voting in the mayoral election–i convinced her that she had a roughly 1/1000 chance of swinging the election with her own vote!

DN:I’m impressed that you convinced someone the odds of swinging the vote were 1 in 1000. Your roommate must not have been quantitatively inclined. Don Green and Alan Gerber ran a telephone mobilization experiment testing different messages to see which boosts turnout in an extremely uncompetitive race. As a whole, they found no mobilization from the phone calls. But to the extent any single message moved people to the polls, it was the message that said “the election is extremely close” even though it was certainly not true. People are odd.

AG:no, 1 in 1000 really was a reasonable estimate. close election, small city, local runoff election, very low expected turnout.

(see here , here, and here for more on the probability of a tied election)