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Drowned Out by the Noise? The Downstream Mobilisation Effects of Party Campaigning between Local and General Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2019

Joshua Townsley Open the ORCID record for Joshua Townsley [Opens in a new window]
Joshua Townsley*
Affiliation:
Sheffield Methods Institute, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK, e-mail: [email protected], Twitter: @ JoshuaTownsley
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Abstract

Campaign experiments often report positive effects on voter turnout. But do these effects endure at subsequent elections? Existing studies provide mixed evidence on downstream effects, and the rate at which initial mobilisation effects decay. This paper contributes to existing research by presenting a pre-registered analysis of downstream effects in a unique experimental setting. I test whether effects from a UK partisan experiment in a low turnout election in May 2017 persisted at the high turnout general election a month later. The findings show that in this short space of time, the original turnout effects virtually disappeared, suggesting that downstream effects resulting from campaign experiments can be quickly subsumed by the high saliency of subsequent elections.

Keywords

Campaignsturnoutfield experimentcanvassingleafletspartisan
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , Winter 2020 , pp. 188 - 198
Copyright
© The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2019

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Footnotes

*

The author has no conflict of interest to declare. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: doi: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PI2CBB.

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Supplementary material: Link

Townsley Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PI2CBB
Link
Supplementary material: File

Townsley supplementary material

Online Appendix

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