Are Voters Mobilized by a ‘Friend-and-Neighbor’ on the Ballot? Evidence from a Field Experiment

“Friends-and-Neighbors” Mobilization: A Field Experimental Replication and Extension

“…In our case, voting decisions could be shaped by persuading voters to support local (in-group) candidates or by mobilizing voters to vote, presumably for local candidates, but it remains an open question whether references to candidates' town or county ties should be more (or less) influential. The experimental results reported in Panagopoulos, Leighley, and Hamel (2017) suggest voters are mobilized at higher rates when they are informed that candidates reside in their home counties, but not necessarily in their home towns. The authors speculated that such a finding is potentially explicable by Granovetter's (1973) claim that "weak ties," such as those that may be found in home counties, may be more influential than "strong ties," or those in home towns, because the former lead to widespread diffusion of information while the latter only recirculate information.…”

“…Key argued in Southern Politics in State and Nation that, in the absence of a formal two-party structure, Southern voters in the early 1900s supported the local favorite and elected candidates based on residency, coining the term "friends-and-neighbors" votingor "localism"to describe this phenomenon (1949,37). In a recent study, Panagopoulos et al (2017) deployed a nonpartisan field experiment to examine whether "friends-and-neighbors" voting mobilizes citizens to vote in contemporary elections by randomly informing voters in the 2014 Democratic primary elections for state senate in Massachusetts about the candidates' home towns and counties.…”

“…The current study builds upon Panagopoulos, Leighley, and Hamel (2017) by reporting the results of a randomized field experiment designed to test the impact of localism cues in the 2014 general elections for state senate in Pennsylvania (see Figure 1). Several modifications enable us to extend this line of inquiry to a partisan setting, which potentially boosts external validity because such communications are more typical in political campaigns, but the design also has some limitations discussed below.…”

“…We note that Key's (1949) original argument related to primary elections, while subsequent research on "friends-and-neighbors" voting has focused almost exclusively on general elections (Aspin and Hall 1987;Brunk, Ramesh, and Adams 1988;Dudley and Rapoport 1989;Garand 1988;Holbrook 1991;Kjar and Laband 2002;Lewis-Beck and Rice 1983;Meredith n.d.;Mixon and Tyrone 2004;Macht 1987a, 1987b;Tatalovich 1975). The Panagopoulos, Leighley, and Hamel (2017) experiment conducted in the Massachusetts primary elections was designed as a direct application of Key's (1949) original argument, but the current study was implemented in a general election to better discriminate between the role of turnout in "friends-and-neighbors" voting in primaries and general election contexts. Of course, Key's (1949) theory also predicts that candidates will be elected on…”

Fighting over friends and neighbors: The effect of inter-candidate geographic distance on intra-party competition

“…But arguably even those candidates without any of the mentioned attributes are likely to receive a higher vote share in their local area than elsewhere, simply based on their place of residence. Voters' place of residence co-define their social identities, and the place-based component of those identities can also become salient when local candidates appear on the ballot (Panagopoulos et al, 2017).…”