Learning to Turn Out: Effects of Actionable Instruction on Student Voting (WP-25-18)
Mary McGrath, Caroline Pippert, Quinn Mulroy, Robert Donahue, Katrina Weimholt, Thomas Ogorzalek, and Tabitha Bonilla
Because voting is habitual, promoting turnout among novice voters holds promise as an efficient focal point for voter turnout efforts. Without a framework built from prior experience, novice voters lack procedural efficacy regarding turnout. As with any learners encountering a new process, novice voters face an interaction of psychological and technical barriers, such that small logistical hurdles present outsize obstacles to initiating the task. Here, the researchers present the results of a university-wide field experiment, with data collected over five election cycles, that tests the hypothesis that student voters benefit from an approach focused on helping them learn how to vote. They find that providing simple messages with actionable instruction in voter turnout has a large and sustained effect on voter turnout; that resource-intensive personalization of the voter turnout support provides little added benefit; and that highly-personalized reminders without actionable instruction have no effect on voter turnout. These findings are especially important for institutions with tight resource constraints, highlighting a low-resource avenue through which to support students in becoming civically engaged.