Comparing “Get-out-the-Vote” Methods
It is no secret that voter turnout is hugely important in any election. It is important for individual candidates—they require their supporters to not only support them, but to support them in the particular fashion of showing up at a booth and casting a ballot—but also for the country as a whole, regardless of who wins as a politician, because high turnout reflects positively on our country, whereas a low turnout reflects a general apathy and nihilism toward the state of the Union. And no citizen wants to live in a nation where his countrymen do not care about the place they call home. Today, turnout floats around 30%.
Methods of improving voter turnout and encouraging citizens to get out and vote have existed in some form or another for a long time. Classic methods include door-to-door canvassing, telephoning, mailings, and more recently, email, Facebook, twitter, and other electronic social-media networks. It turns out that door-to-door and face-to-face canvassing is still the most effective method at improving turnout, increasing it by about 8% (that is, of every 100 people that would not have voted before being canvassed, about 8 will afterward).
Nevertheless, a recent study observed a “2.2% increase in verified” from a single message about voting being shared by friends. Considering how easy the Facebook share is compared to face-to-face canvassing, a 2.2% increase is dramatic. But here is where things get interesting: voting is pretty irrational. No single person could have altered any Presidential election in this country’s history. So why bother? This is the reason voter turnout is so low. So when you see your friends sharing links about voting, and how they have voted, why would that not make you less likely to vote?—your vote is going to matter even less, especially if you cast your vote for the same candidate. It is interesting to postulate that there may be some sort of information cascade or network effect here that is stronger than the rational approach to the irrational act of voting, which is simply not to waste your time with it. Maybe someone that knows they cannot change the fate of the election votes anyway because so many of his friends did, and believes they may know something he did not. That is, he sees their decision (to vote), but not their signal (why they are voting), and he is swayed to vote as well.
But this is somewhat different than an information cascade because there is not a simultaneous share telling you every time one of your friends did not vote. And in this case, would you not be more inclined to cast your own, knowing that it bears more weight? But you may wonder if it’s worth it after all, given that so many others are forgoing to process. So you can see there is something akin to a paradox at work here, regarding sharing “go vote!” links on Facebook, how people actually vote.
Maybe in the interest of science we should start a “don’t vote” campaign to see how effective it is.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/12/important-study-facebook-quadruples-the-power-of-campaign-messages/
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/16/why-the-internet-doesnt-make-us-care-more-about-politics/