Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. Amazon Restaurants Food delivery from local restaurants. ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics. E-democracy as voter tries to auction ballot online June 9: A Londoner has attempted to sell his or her vote for tomorrow's elections on eBay, it has emerged.
Elections in 'chaos', say Tories.
Postal riches for local rags June Turnout could increase by at least a third in the four English regions earmarked for all-postal voting in tomorrow's local and European elections. Postal votes deliver higher turnouts Blair: I'm still in charge, whatever the result Prescott predicts high vote Tube strike to hit mayor's election. Placebo politics June 3, David Clark: The resort to postal voting assumes that there is a quick fix for our deep democratic malaise David McKie: Race to meet postal ballot deadline June 1: Chaos fears as 4m forms yet to be delivered before midnight.
Making voters care Letters: Voting beyond the grave. The postal threat to democracy May 30, Observer leader: The 10 June elections will suffer. Postal vote chaos could put back election date Tories warn of postal vote chaos Weapon of mass distribution. Bush factor June Poll shows Ukip will split Tory vote June Ukip starts to plan its wrecking tactics. Election blow to Labour and Tories May Nothing Blair says suggests he has learned the lessons June 16, Polly Toynbee: After last week's disaster, more of the same will simply make things worse. Going postal June 14, leader: It was an American who lamented that people would cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but wouldn't cross the street to vote.
This is certainly a protest, and Blair will have to start listening to it. Just 70 June 11, Joan Bakewell: It wasn't easy and I nearly didn't bother. I can see why others don't. But I voted and I'm glad I did. Pollsters tell us nothing June 11, Hywel Williams: The power of 'public opinion' is a myth. This election could make or break the far-right party, he writes.
Would-be protest voters need to get a grip on reality June 9, Polly Toynbee: The priority should be to block the anti-democratic right, not punish Blair. An overshadowed vote June 9, Guardian leader: With a general election likely in less than 12 months, this week's results could transform the ecology of British politics. The end of the affair June 8: Blair's personal political journey has taken New Labour away from the woman-friendly brand it once was, argues Helen McCarthy. Show a little respect, George June 8, David Aaronovitch: George Galloway does not salute my indefatigability.
Abstinence is good for you June 8, Zoe Williams: I want to start by saying that I write this in good faith, and not because I've lost my polling card. Though I couldn't, off the top of my head, tell you where my polling card was. Thursday is about more than the war June 8, Caroline Lucas: We need to take radical action over climate change and poverty.
The limits of being Irish June 8, Guardian leader: In a week that will climax with important elections in this country, keep an eye on a significant vote taking place in Ireland on Friday. Conservatives could turn the UKIP nuisance to their advantage. Inside Europe June 7, Ian Black: No prizes for predicting that apathy and ignorance will ensure yet another record low turnout in this week's European elections - just at the moment when million people across the continent are eligible to vote.
Tony's extraordinary new friend June 6, Andrew Rawnsley: At least there will be one New Labour success to celebrate after this Thursday's elections. His name is Ken Livingstone. All mouth, no trousers June 6, Nick Cohen: Why do we make so much fuss about a bunch of no-hope, neo-Nazi criminals called the BNP? Labour - still the best choice June 6, leader: Some see Thursday's elections as a chance to protest. But that ignores the government's many successes.
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Voting's too good for 'em June 4, Polly Toynbee: The public cavil endlessly at politicians while wallowing in wilful ignorance and bitter prejudice. Politicians get the voters they deserve. Europe or America - you decide June 4, Nick Clegg: June 10 is our chance to challenge Blair's limpet-like loyalty to Bush. Voting made complicated June 3, Catherine Bennett: The Greater London returning officer has sent each London voter their very own idiot's guide, packed with hints for those about to embark on the onerous exercise that is modern suffrage.
Ill-focused protest is too destructive June 3, John Denham: Iraq angered many, but voting against Labour is not the answer. Mea culpa, that's what we want June 2, George Galloway: Not one politician has lost their job over Iraq. It is time they did. Amidst the sour self-seeking, Europe is falling into decay June 2, Polly Toynbee: Instead of building on the EU's success, politicians are fuelling its crisis.
What has the European parliament ever done for us? June 1, Oliver Burkeman: MEPs can list many achievements for their parliament. But they don't expect any credit, let alone that voters should know who they are. Where do the parties stand? See what the parties were campaigning on in the June 10 polls. Last year's local elections. Local government election results Northern Irish assembly results Welsh assembly election results Welsh assembly - topup vote results.
Scottish parliamentary election results Scottish parliament - topup vote results. Ukip emerges as the protest vote of choice The Conservatives were forced to share some of Labour's electoral pain as the European election results began to come through last night. These are no swivel-eyed xenophobes. Blair hasn't learned his lesson. In their two field experiments, for example, simply altering how an individual is described as a voter vs.
Compared to the numerous prior voter mobilization field experiments, which often involve several thousand or more subjects, the magnitude of these treatment effects is quite large.
Although the mode of treatment administration the internet is different from that used in most other mobilization studies e. For example, a meta-analysis by Green and Gerber 5 of previous studies looking at the effect of direct mailing on turnout estimates the impact of a single piece of nonpartisan, nonadvocacy mail to be roughly 0.
Even mail that invokes strong social pressure to partake in the socially desirable act of voting, which is frequently the most effective message, on average, raises turnout by only 2.
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Treatments administered by telephone are sometimes more effective than mailings, but compared with an uncontacted control group, the most effective calls live calls made by volunteers , on average, increase turnout by only 2. Furthermore, the general finding in the literature is that mobilization effects are largest in less salient elections during which baseline mobilization efforts are low and turnout is modest and much less effective in the highest profile races [as in the presidential election context for experiments 1 and 2 in the work by Bryan et al.
The intervention by Bryan et al. However, this emphasis on encouraging participation by producing positive psychological associations with the act of voting rather than by encouraging voting for instrumental reasons is a common and sometimes effective approach. The personal instrumental benefits from voting are likely smaller than the costs of doing so, because the odds that a voter affects the outcome of a mass election i.
In light of this argument, researchers have studied a number of alternative motivations for political participation.
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Experimental interventions shown to increase turnout include efforts to apply as mentioned above social pressure 8 as well as more subtle efforts to reinforce prosocial behavior by expressing gratitude for previous participation 9. Given the significance of the research by Bryan et al. In addition to comparing the relative efficacy of the noun and verb survey instruments, we also benchmark the effectiveness of these interventions to simply making contact a nonpolitical placebo survey and a standard get out the vote GOTV message that provides information about the upcoming election and mentions that many other people are expected to vote a social norms message.
We make two central contributions. First, we show that the results reported in the work by Bryan et al. However, given that some elements are different, alternatively, our study may instead quite reasonably be thought of as a test of robustness showing a failure to generalize rather than as a failure to replicate. Although our study uses the same item treatment battery as that in the work by Bryan et al.
Rather, we follow the suggestion of Bryan et al.
A field experiment shows that subtle linguistic cues might not affect voter behavior
Our experiment, which is conducted on a much larger scale among a randomly selected set of all registrants and in several states with varying levels of electoral competitiveness, provides little evidence that the noun treatment is effective in increasing the frequency of voting over the verb treatment. Second, our experiment, which appears to be the first independent attempt, to our knowledge, to test the method proposed by Bryan et al. Our result implies that, even if the same experimental procedures used in the original study were repeated a hypothetical proposal given that a prior electoral context cannot be perfectly reproduced , the original result might not hold.
Follow-up studies that examine reproducibility and robustness are an important step in consolidating our understanding of a novel approach given the frequency with which initially promising findings are not found in subsequent studies, despite large effect sizes and small P values 10 , Overall, our results provide information that the larger scholarly and policy community should take into account when evaluating the accuracy and importance of the claim that these types of very minor interventions can be used to motivate significant behavioral changes, particularly because the noun treatment seems less effective than a standard voter mobilization message.
We first obtained a complete list of registered voters in each state. Before treatment assignment, we excluded records likely to be invalid or persons who could not be contacted by phone.
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In households with multiple registrants, one registrant was selected at random for inclusion in the sample. From this pool, subjects were then randomly assigned to a treatment, four of which we analyze here: Non-English speakers were excluded as noncontacted. Assignment stratum details are reported in Supporting Information. Registrants were assigned to the placebo message at twice the rate of the other interventions. Subjects who were reached by telephone and answered in the affirmative are coded as contacted. When we present our statistical findings, we compare outcomes across treatments among subjects who we successfully contacted by phone using this common treatment-independent definition of contact subjects are coded as contacted if and only if they answered yes when asked if they were a resident of their state.
It is important to note that this question was asked before the portion of each script that branches into the respective treatment. Voting in the primary was measured using turnout as recorded in updated state voter files obtained from a vendor in March of and linked using the original voter file identification number. Individuals are coded as having voted if they are recorded as having done so in the official record, and they are coded as not having voted if they either are recorded as not having done so in the official record or no longer appear in the voter file.
Note that the over 4, subjects assigned to the noun and verb conditions are many times the sample size of the two field experiments experiments 2 and 3 reported in the work by Bryan et al. Additionally, it is adequately powered to detect even small differences in treatment effectiveness. We examine the behavioral response associated with the treatment by conducting differences in proportions tests for turnout between those in the voter and voting conditions.
This pattern suggests that the treatments were successfully deployed and understood as different messages by recipients. Complete results are in Table S2. Overall participation was 1. Also, we did not find evidence that the noun intervention is more effective when we partition the data by state, district electoral context, past patterns of voter participation, or expected turnout rates.
Turnout was higher in the verb condition by 0. In noncompetitive primary districts, turnout was 1. Across groupings of past participation behavior, the verb treatment is more effective than the noun treatment for those who have ever voted For registrants who had previously voted but never participated in a primary, turnout is Expected turnout is constructed based on the relationship between voting, demographics, and electoral context using the relationship observed among those in the voting condition.
More details are in Supporting Information. The estimates reported in column 5 in Table 1 show that we obtain similar null results when we analyze our data using ordinary least squares regression, an approach that allows us to account for observable covariates and the stratified nature of our sampling method and treatment assignment.
Positive coefficient estimates indicate that turnout is higher in the noun than in the verb condition. We include as covariates indicators for the list of demographic, political, and participatory factors taken from the voter file and used in the balance tests. Each of these variables is interacted with a state indicator to capture variation in their effects across states.
Full model results are in Table S3. For the entire sample and 10 subsamples analyzed in Table 1 , 9 of the estimates for noun minus verb treatment effect are negative or zero, implying the best guess of the effect of the noun rather than verb treatment is that it either reduces participation or leads to no difference in relative effects. In two subsamples places where either party primary was competitive or among voters who have never participated in a primary , we estimate positive effects, but they are substantively small and far from statistically significant.
The analyses in Table 1 include all individuals who confirmed their state of residence i. We could, however, adopt a stricter definition of treatment in light of the fact that some respondents break off contact there is attrition from this point to the end of the question treatment script. For example, we might consider an individual treated if she, instead, provides a response to the second question asked in both treatments about awareness of the upcoming primary. Alternatively, we might restrict our attention to only those individuals who complete all 10 survey items although because these items differ in the two treatment arms, this subsample may also be different across treatments, creating a possibility of selection bias.
Panel A in Table S4 replicates the analysis in Table 1 for those who answered the election awareness item and confirms the pattern of finding little evidence that the noun treatment increases turnout full model results for all analyses reported in Table S4 are in Tables S5—S7. Similarly, when we restrict attention in panel B in Table S4 to those who completed the entire item treatment script, the largest estimated regression coefficient is 1 point with a SE of 3.
We also consider one potential source of the difference between our results and those reported in the work by Bryan et al. In their two field experiments, individuals were contacted the day before or the morning of the election, whereas our calls took place during the 4 days before each election. For this reason, in panel C in Table S4 , we restrict our attention to the nonrandom subset of those individuals who completed the entire survey and were contacted the day before the election.
We did not call respondents on Election Day; in Tennessee, no calls were made the day before the election for budgetary reasons. The largest estimate is 6. The preceding analysis provides little evidence that completing a survey using a noun to describe the act of voting increases participation more than when a verb is used. Despite the absence of a difference between the two treatment groups, however, both the noun and verb treatment scripts might still positively affect participation and thus, serve as valuable mobilization tools.