Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France

By V. Pons. The American Economic Review, 2018

103 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper provides the first estimate of the effect of door-to-door canvassing on actual electoral outcomes, via a countrywide experiment embedded in François Hollande's campaign in the 2012 French presidential election. While existing experiments randomized door-to-door visits at the individual level, the scale of this campaign (five million doors knocked) enabled randomization by precinct, the level at which vote shares are recorded administratively. Visits did not affect turnout, but increased Hollande's vote share in the first round and accounted for one-fourth of his victory margin in the second. Visits' impact persisted in later elections, suggesting a lasting persuasion effect. (JEL C93, D7, D83)

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/771c2198a360130684b8791df8befb6922247021

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Citations in the corpus

Interpretable Almost Matching Exactly With Instrumental Variables (2019, methodology): “Unlike the earlier study (Pons, 2018), our estimates are independent of the strong parametric assumptions of 2SLS.”
Habit Formation in Voting: Evidence from Rainy Elections (2016, background): “Meredith’s estimate is an order of magnitude smaller than both Gerber, Green, and Shachar’s and ours, but his study design identifies a different estimand that is likely to be small.”