Face-to-face Campaigning in Action
By Daniel Strauss - Jan 14th, 2009 at 9:50 amThe good, graph-loving people at The Monkey Cage pass this one along:
John Sides, the post’s author, cites research by Steven Rosenstone and Mark Hansen as a possible explanation for a resurgence in voting levels:
Mobilization. Some prominent research by Steven Rosenstone and Mark Hansen explained the earlier decline in terms of declining mobilization efforts. This seems to be a promising explanation for the increase, as presidential campaigns have rediscovered old-school shoe-leather campaigning and political scientists have shown that voter contact, when done right, can increase turnout by several percentage points (see this repository of findings). At this stage, the only 2008 data we have is exit poll respondents’ self-reported contact from the campaigns, which isn’t sufficient to prove that mobilization mattered. And the data we have is also somewhat equivocal: the self-reported rate of contact was slightly lower in 2008 than 2004, as McDonald notes.
Face-to-face contact was a huge part of Barack Obama’s campaign, and it’s clear that it paid off.
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January 14th, 2009 at 1:30 pm