Gerber Alan S, Huber Gregory A, Fang Albert H, Reardon Catlan E
Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.
Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2017 Aug 9;12(8):e0182199. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0182199. eCollection 2017.
Given the persistence of public doubts about the integrity of ballot secrecy, which depress turnout, two prior experiments have shown precise evidence that both official governmental and unofficial mobilization campaigns providing assurances about ballot secrecy increase turnout among recently registered nonvoters. To assess whether these findings replicate in other political settings, we describe a replication experiment where a non-governmental, non-partisan mobilization campaign sent similar treatment mailings containing assurances about ballot secrecy protections to recently registered nonvoters during the 2014 general election in Mississippi. We find that sending this mailer has no effect on turnout rates in this setting, which is characterized by an unusually low baseline turnout rate. These results are consistent with past research concluding that nonpartisan Get Out The Vote (GOTV) mail has very weak effects among very low turnout propensity registrants, and suggest that there are heterogeneous effects of ballot secrecy treatments associated with subjects' characteristics and the electoral context.
鉴于公众对选票保密性的完整性一直存在疑虑，这压低了投票率，此前的两项实验已显示出确切证据，即官方政府和非官方动员活动提供的关于选票保密的保证都会提高最近登记的未投票者的投票率。为了评估这些发现是否能在其他政治环境中得到复制，我们描述了一项复制实验，在2014年密西西比州的大选中，一个非政府、无党派的动员活动向最近登记的未投票者发送了类似的包含选票保密保护保证的宣传邮件。我们发现，在这种以异常低的基线投票率为特征的环境中，发送此邮件对投票率没有影响。这些结果与过去的研究一致，该研究得出结论，无党派的投票动员邮件对投票倾向极低的登记者影响非常微弱，并表明与选票保密处理相关的存在异质性影响，这与受试者的特征和选举背景有关。
