Voting May Be Habit-Forming

Habit is a frequently mentioned but understudied cause of political action. This article provides the first direct test of the hypothesis that casting a ballot in one election increases one’s propensity to go to the polls in the future. A field experiment involving 25,200 registered voters was conducted prior to the November general election of 1998. Subjects were randomly assigned to treatment conditions in which they were urged to vote through direct mail or face-to-face canvassing. Compared to a control group that received no contact, the treatment groups were significantly more likely to vote in 1998. The treatment groups were also significantly more likely to vote in local elections held in November of 1999. After deriving a statistical estimator to isolate the effect of habit, we find that, ceteris paribus, voting in one election substantially increases the likelihood of voting in the future. Indeed, the influence of past voting exceeds the effects of age and education reported in previous studies. For the better part of a century, political scientists have charted individual and group differences in political participation. Scholars such as Harold Gosnell (1927) observed early on that voter turnout rates differed markedly among groups defined by ethnicity, class, gender, and region. In the 1950s, these aggregate

Ballot · Ceteris paribus · Demographic economics · Economics · Habit · Local election · Microeconomics · Political science · Politics · Randomized experiment · Respondent · Sociology · Statistics · Voting · Voting behavior · Demography · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Law · Mathematics · Media Influence and Politics · Psychology · Social Psychology

• The Downstream Benefits of Experimentation

  Open Access•Donald P Green, Alan S Gerber•Political Analysis•2002

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