This paper studies the motives behind socially pressuring others in the context of voter mobilization. In this online experiment, college students choose whether to send an email that pressures their campus peers to register to vote for the 2020 U.S. Elections. The senders have a negative average willingness-to-pay (WTP) to send the email, meaning they would rather pay than pressure their peers. The experiment reveals two counteracting motives at play. On the positive side, senders believe that pressuring their peers will persuade them to register. On the negative side, they believe that their peers will dislike being pressured, which outweighs the positive motives. However, under anonymous messaging, they become much less sensitive to whether the recipient dislikes being pressured, and their average WTP turns positive. This pattern of behavior reflects voters who are motivated by the prospect of mobilizing their peers, but are restrained by self-interested concerns from social costs or retaliation.
“Don’t You Plan on Voting?” The Motives and Effects of Peer Pressure in Voter Mobilization
I would like to thank Stefano DellaVigna, Ned Augenblick, Leo Bursztyn, Ross Chu, Eugen Dimant, Fred Finan, Eric Koepcke, Maximiliano Lauletta, Elizabeth Linos, Dan Moore, Billy Morrison, Max Mueller, Afras Sial, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, Dmitry Taubinsky, and participants at the 2022 ESA Special Meeting, 2022 AFE conference, and Hertie School Political Economy Seminar for many comments and suggestions. I gratefully acknowledge funding from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans, and the Experimental Social Science Laboratory (Xlab) at Berkeley. I also thank Uri Gneezy, Ryan Oprea, and Marta Serra-Garcia for their logistical support, and the Anderson Behavioral Lab at UCLA, the Experimental and Behavioral Economics Lab at UCSB, the Rady Incentives Lab at UCSD, and Xlab at UC Berkeley for facilitating this study. I gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Institute on Aging to the National Bureau of Economic Research through grant number T32-AG000186. Preregistration: AEARCTR-0006364. IRB: UC Berkeley CPHS #2020-03-13093.
Kim W (2025), "“Don’t You Plan on Voting?” The Motives and Effects of Peer Pressure in Voter Mobilization". Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Vol. 20 No. 2 pp. 231–268, doi: https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00024022
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