Getting Out the People to Get Out the Vote – Expecting Fun Mobilizes Party Members to Volunteer in Political Campaigns
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2019-07-05
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en
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Political participation is very important for a functioning democracy. Still, most citizens only
vote, instead of participating in more impactful ways, such as volunteering in a political
campaign. To encourage more people to actively participate, this paper aims at understanding
the psychological factors behind the decision to politically volunteer and examines ways to
mobilize people to participate. To do so, a questionnaire was filled in by 102 participants.
Results indicated that the intention to volunteer in a political campaign was predicted by the
perceived efficacy of volunteering, the perceived relevance of the election and the attitude
towards volunteering, which was predicted by the belief that volunteering would be fun.
Qualitative answers additionally indicated that the attitude towards the party also plays a role
in the decision to volunteer. Based on these findings an intervention was developed that aimed
at mobilizing party members to participate in a door-to-door canvassing campaign. This was
done by randomly assigning 8000 new party members to four groups, with each group receiving
a differently framed mail. It was found that the mail with the frame ‘Door-to-door canvassing
is fun’ elicited significantly more clicks to the registration website than the ‘Core values of the
party’ frame and the mail with a combination of both frames, but not significantly more clicks
than the mail without any framing. These results indicate that parties should try to highlight the
characteristics of the volunteering activity that are perceived as being ‘fun’ instead of their core
values when mobilizing their party members.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen