Is Door-to-Door Canvassing Effective in Europe? Evidence from a Meta-study across Six European Countries

Abstract

A vast amount of experimental evidence suggests that get-out-the-vote encouragements delivered through door-to-door canvassing have large effects on turnout. Most of the existing studies have been conducted in the United States, and are inspiring European mobilization campaigns. This article explores the empirical question of whether the American findings are applicable to Europe. It combines existing European studies and presents two new Danish studies to show that the pooled point estimate of the effect is substantially smaller in Europe than in the United States, and finds no effects in the two Danish experiments. The article discusses why the effects seem to be different in Europe compared to the United States, and stresses the need for further experiments in Europe as there is still considerable uncertainty regarding the European effects. While one possible explanation is that differences in turnout rates explain the differences in effect sizes, the empirical analysis finds no strong relationship between turnout and effect sizes in either Europe or the United States.

Growing into Voting : Election Turnout among Young People and Habit Formation

“…It should, however, be noted that most of these field experiments have been conducted in the US. Experiments with door-to-door canvassing in Europe have had little or no effect (Bhatti et al 2016;Nyman 2017). Other experiments have been more in line with results from the US.…”

“…Even though they include a number of control variables to their model, the Introduction risk of omitted variable bias is still there. Furthermore, other studies have reached the conclusion that habits are formed within specific electoral contexts (Meredith 2009;Coppock and Green 2016;Bhatti et al 2016). This suggests that experiencing an EP election with a low turnout as the first election after coming of age might not affect the propensity to vote in subsequent elections of other types, including national elections.…”

“…Cutts, Fieldhouse, and John 2009;Coppock and Green 2016), although questions have been raised about how generalisable those results are. Similar mobilising campaigns in Europe have failed to produce the same effects (Bhatti et al 2016). Furthermore, there are reasons to suspect that a subpopulation that is susceptible to GOTV targeting is different from the general population (Meredith 2009).…”

Is it worth door-knocking? Evidence from a United Kingdom-based Get Out The Vote (GOTV) field experiment on the effect of party leaflets and canvass visits on voter turnout

“…However, there is a sharp imbalance in the literature between United States and Europeanbased studies (Bhatti et al 2016;Bhatti et al 2017;Foos and de Rooij 2017;John 2017). Emerging evidence in Europe is seeking to rectify the imbalance (e.g., Ramiro, Morales and Jiménez-Buedo 2012;Pons and Liegey 2018;Bhatti et al 2016;Cantoni and Pons 2016;Foos and John 2016;Pons 2018; Nyman 2017)-and provides evidence that existing findings do not generalize well to non-US contexts. Bhatti et al's (2016) meta-study of nine canvassing experiments across six European countries finds that canvassing, for example, has a smaller effect-a precision-weighted effect of 0.78 percentage points, compared to 2.54 percentage points in the United States.…”

Is it worth door-knocking? Evidence from a UK-based GOTV field experiment on the effect of leaflets and canvass visits on voter turnout

“…However, there is a sharp imbalance in the literature between United States and Europeanbased studies (Bhatti et al 2016;Bhatti et al 2017;Foos and de Rooij 2017;John 2017). Emerging evidence in Europe is seeking to rectify the imbalance (e.g., Ramiro, Morales and Jiménez-Buedo 2012;Pons and Liegey 2018;Bhatti et al 2016;Cantoni and Pons 2016;Foos and John 2016;Pons 2018;Nyman 2017)-and provides evidence that existing findings do not generalize well to non-US contexts. Bhatti et al's (2016) meta-study of nine canvassing experiments across six European countries finds that canvassing, for example, has a smaller effect-a precision-weighted effect of 0.78 percentage points, compared to 2.54 percentage points in the United States.…”