Leveraging Peer‐to‐Peer Connections to Increase Voter Participation in Local Elections

In local elections outcomes can turn on just hundreds of voters. Small-scale political entrepreneurs find it increasingly difficult to wage effective turnout campaigns relying on traditional, costly methods of outreach. Yet a growing literature on social pressure indicates that recasting voting as a socially motivated act increases the likelihood that voters participate. In this paper I present matching analyses of the impact of a new platform that relies on peer-to-peer voter outreach. I find that the intervention is responsible for significant increases in the likelihood that a voter casts a ballot in low information elections across different sorts of voters.