Persuasive politics: Cialdini’s principles of persuasion at work
Social psychology, and the work of Dr. Robert Cialdini and colleagues in particular, has had an outsized influence on modern-day political strategies. Here, we review the principles and talk about how they are used in politics.
You don’t have to tell me twice: Additional text message reminders for confirming volunteer attendance for Mobilize event
This study tested the efficacy of sending an additional personal text message reminder to volunteers who have RSVP’d for an event in boosting event turnout.
The skill of the chase 2: Do chaser postcards help to amplify the utility of an earlier voter contact?
Abstract: This study tested the efficacy of postcards that follow up on a successful voter contact made by a campaign in increasing voter turnout. Six state legislative campaigns in 4 states provided SDAN with a list of people that they had successfully contacted and identified as supporters through phonebanking or canvassing. A randomly chosen half […]
Blue waves: Do 2 waves of primary GOTV postcards increase voter turnout?
This study sought to determine if voter turnout among low-to-mid turnout propensity, high support voters could be improved by sending a GOTV/voter education postcard to voters ahead of each of the 2020 state and presidential primaries in Florida, Georgia, and Minnesota.
A culture of voting: Does early, repeated voter contact help boost odd year voter turnout?
This study sought to determine if sending 3 waves of handwritten postcards to high support, mid-low turnout propensity voters could increase voter turnout for the 2019 Virginia, Louisiana, and Mississippi primary and general elections.
The ladder of engagement: Can we move volunteers from lower stakes to higher stakes volunteering?
This pilot study explored whether showing volunteers an educational video about the relative value of various volunteer activities could move them “up the ladder of engagement” to more high stakes volunteer activities.
The skill of the chase: Do chaser postcards help to amplify the utility of an earlier voter contact?
This pilot study tested whether sending a handwritten postcard to a voter, to follow up on a successful voter contact made by a campaign earlier that year, could increase voter turnout.
State legislatures in the 2020 election: what happened?
None of the state chambers targeted by Democrats flipped in 2020. As in any complex system, many factors likely contributed to these results. Let’s take a look at three possible groups of explanations that may have contributed to state legislative outcomes: gerrymandering, roll-off/ticket-splitting, and enthusiasm/awareness gap. This analysis aims to describe what happened, but not […]
Crowding at the ballot box: Voter responses to crowdedness and voting methods during the age of COVID-19
Sister District Action Network (SDAN) teamed up with Dr. Josh Ackerman and PhD candidate Iris Wang from the University of Michigan to conduct a randomized controlled trial via survey in July 2020 in order to investigate the effect of Covid-19 on voter thoughts and attitudes.
Friendraising works: Exploring message type and sender and their effects on friendraising
Sister District Action Network (SDAN) ran this study to explore the efficacy of friendraising, or leveraging personal relationships to raise money for candidates, by comparing two different email message frames, as well as comparing the efficacy of friendraising emails to the efficacy of traditional candidate fundraising emails sent from Sister District Project HQ.
