Resource Type: Experiments

From August 2018 to November 2018 during the mid-term elections, approximately 5000 unique OUTVOTE users were able to send out approximately 132,000 GOTV messages. Treatment in this study was definited as receiving a GOTV message from an OUTVOTE user. Using statistical analysis, the study team wanted to dtermine the outcome and impact of friend-to-friend text messages on voter turnout using queue position in texting and the level of confidence in the voter file match. Individuals messaged by friends were 8.2% more likely to cast a vote, while those who were sent a mesagge by a field organizer had an increase of only 0.29%. 

The Movement Cooperative and Deliver Strategies tested a variety of different mailer types – varying the presence of official-sounding language, emotional appears, and issue linkages – to evaluate impact on vote-by-mail (VBM) recruitment. Using an online panel matched to national demographics, they found that mailers increased intent to vote by 2.5 percentage points and intent to vote by mail by 7.5pp compared to their control condition of a placebo. More specifically, mailers with official-sounding language performed the best on intent to vote while emotional appeals decreased voter enthusiasm while increasing social trust. Takeaways from this study are that VBM mailers, regardless of frame, are effective in increasing intent to vote and intent to vote by mail and that official-sounding language works best, which is line with other non-VBM GOTV research that shows that straightforward approaches are best when it comes to GOTV.

Negative framing consistently outperformed positive framing in email and on Facebook in motivating supporters to take action as part of a campaign around San Diego’s utility agreement.

Reading climate fiction (or cli-fi) is a new but promising way to engage people who are not climate denialists, but who are not too concerned about climate change either. After reading a short cli-fi story, people believed more strongly that climate change would cause harm to themselves and future generations, as well as more severe droughts, poverty, and refugees. This, in turn, boosted belief that the President and Congress should make climate change a high priority. Notably, these belief changes were temporary, fading away after one month; this suggests that people may need to read cli-fi regularly to be persuaded more permanently.             

Decades of political communication research has pointed to political persuasion (or changing someone’s mind) being one of the most difficult things to achieve, with campaigns having small effects on average. This would suggest that attempts at political persuasion, such as political ads in an electoral campaign, mostly do not move the needle much (if at all) with audiences. However, one response has been that these small average effects may be masking larger individual effects from sources of heterogeneity, or contextual pieces of a political ad such as message (content, tone, sponsor), audience (partisanship), and setting (battleground status, primary vs. general election, timing). 
Using an astonishing real-time design consisting of real ads from US presidential candidates, 59 unique experiments and 34,000 respondents over the course of the 2016 presidential election, the authors of this study find little evidence that any of the above conditions matter much when it comes to the persuasive effect of political ads on candidate favorability and vote choice. Indeed, owing to the large number of respondents (which makes finding even tiny effects more likely), the authors found a small but significant effect that ads can influence candidate favorability but no significant effect on ads actually influencing vote choice. In other words, the effectiveness of presidential campaign ads – even targeted ones – on persuading people to vote for one candidate or another may be greatly overstated.

Use emotionally positive images of climate change solutions to grab people’s attention. Using experiments with undergraduate students that measure individuals’ reaction time, researchers found that positive images of climate change, like windmills and solar panels, were better at grabbing participants’ attention than negative images of causes (smokestacks, air pollution) and effects (glaciers melting) of climate change. In fact, using negative images of climate change was no more attention grabbing than images irrelevant to climate change. The use of positive images may be even more important for grabbing the attention of those who are least disposed to care about the environment and climate change. So, when developing media and communication information, consider using positive images of climate change solutions.