The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform

4. Parties, Candidates, and Their Agents: Partisan Demobilization

98 Sometimes clean election reforms damage the quality of democracy directly. When lawmakers enact restrictive voter registration procedures, participation rates decline as a direct result. When election administrators remove eligible voters from the registry, people are immediately excluded. Sometimes, however, the damage to democracy is indirect. Lawmakers and election officials put in place clean election reforms that cause parties,candidates,and their agents to alter their campaign strategies, and it is the adoption of these new strategies that keeps people away from the polls. In this chapter, I focus on the reaction of political parties, candidates, and agents to clean election reforms and the adverse effects that these reactions can have on voter turnout. Specifically, I examine the effect of reforms on the strategies that parties, candidates, and agents use to convince eligible voters to get to the polls—what might be called partisan strategies of “mobilization.” In this context, it is helpful to distinguish two kinds of mobilization. “Personal” mobilization relies on face-to-face contact with friends, neighbors, coworkers, party workers, or candidates and takes place anywhere—in the home or workplace or at a club, rally, or parade. “Impersonal” mobilization relies instead on mass media exposure and advertising or on things like campaign mailings and commercial phone banks. Partisan “demobilization” occurs when parties, candidates, and their operatives , reacting to clean election reforms, alter their campaign strategies in ways that keep people away from the polls. This form of demobilization typically occurs in one of two ways. On the one hand, candidates may adopt relatively less effective get-out-the-vote strategies such as mass media advertising where 4 Parties, Candidates, and Their Agents Partisan Demobilization Parties, Candidates, and Their Agents 99 once they relied on relatively more effective face-to-face canvassing. We might characterize this shift as one from personal to impersonal forms of election campaigning, and the reduction in turnout that results is typically unplanned. On the other hand, parties, candidates, and their agents may deliberately choose to pursue strategies of demobilization: instead of focusing only on inducing their supporters to vote, they may also deliberately keep supporters of their opponents away from the polls. We might characterize this shift as a calculated move from mobilization to a mixed strategy of mobilization and demobilization . In the following sections, I look at each variant in turn. From Personal to Impersonal Mobilization: Cutting Out the Go-Between Over the past century, political parties in Europe and the United States have come to rely less and less on personal modes of mobilization and more and more on impersonal ones. This shift has brought about changes in how voters participate in elections. Wattenberg (2000, 66) explains: As voters have come to experience campaigns through television rather than through personal contact with members of party organizations,voting has become less of a social act and more of a civic duty. No longer do voters go to the polls because they have been urged to do so by their friends, relatives, and neighbours. Rather, those who decide to vote do so largely to express their opinions. It is, in part, to this decline in personal mobilization that Wattenberg attributes the “nearly universal” decline in turnout in the industrialized West (71). The importance of face-to-face contact for turnout has been demonstrated empirically by a series of field experiments conducted by Yale University political scientists Alan Gerber, Donald Green, and their associates. In one experiment , they conveyed nonpartisan get-out-the-vote messages to a random sample of some thirty thousand registered voters in New Haven, Connecticut, through either personal canvassing, direct mail, or telephone calls. Their findings : door-to-door canvassing increased voter turnout by almost ten percentage points and direct mail by less than one percentage point, and telephone calls had no effect on turnout at all.1 Field experiments conducted in the cities of Bridgeport, Columbus, Detroit, Minneapolis, and St. Paul similarly found that 1. Gerber and Green (2000,660). An independent statistical analysis of the same data by Imai (2005) suggests that telephone calls are more effective than Gerber and Green first estimated but still not as effective as door-to-door canvassing, a finding that Gerber and Green (2005) contest. door-to-door canvassing raised turnout an average of almost eleven percentage points (Green, Gerber, and Nickerson 2002).2 The bottom line, as Green, McMillion, and Smith put it, is that “voters...