Electoral Chairs’ Seminars – March 20th

Who is under pressure? A descriptive study of social pressure to vote

Maxime Coulombe – PhD Candidate at Université de Montréal

Randomized field experiments such as Gerber et al.’s (2008) Get-Out-the-Vote study provide causal estimates of the mobilizing effects of social pressure to vote. While offering important contributions, these studies leave open questions regarding how the social pressure mechanism translates into everyday life. How widespread and salient are considerations about the social norm of voting in the general population in “everyday life”? Who receives social pressure to vote and from whom? I aim to fill this gap. To do so, I collected data from 65 electoral studies in 11 democracies, encompassing 550,000 observations from 260,000 unique respondents. This project is in the early-analysis stage. I will present my initial findings.

This content has been updated on 16 March 2023 at 10 h 31 min.