Can Conversing with a Computer Increase Turnout? Mobilization Using Chatbot Communication

By Christopher B. Mann. 2020

14 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract According to the burgeoning voter mobilization field experiments literature, impersonal contact has little-to-no effect. A conversation with a computer is, by definition, an impersonal interaction. However, chatbots are form of communication wherein a computer imitates conversations by interacting using natural language. Human-to-chatbot interactions are often perceived as similar to human-to-human interactions. How ubiquitous are chatbots? Just ask Siri, Cortana, Bixby, or Alexa, or ask for help on any e-commerce website (these are each chatbots). A simple voter mobilization treatment reminding users of a political chatbot (Resistbot) to vote and providing information about polling locations and hours increased turnout by 1.8 percentage points in a 2019 election. The results replicate previously unpublished field experiments by Resistbot in 2018 that found smaller but statistically significant increases in turnout.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Natural Language Processing

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William S. Isaac

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Citations in the corpus

Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models (2021, methodology): “presidential election were published by bots, according to one estimate, as were about a third of all tweets about that year’s Brexit vote” (Hampton, 2019; Mann, 2021; Schneier, 2020).”