Does the effectiveness of a “Get Out The Vote” (GOTV) contact depend upon the method by which a voter casts a ballot? This study investigates whether those who must vote by mail are more or less responsive to an in-person mobilization message than voters who live in traditional precincts...

Voter mobilization experiments are often conducted using individual-level randomization, which can be difficult to implement. A simpler approach is to randomly assign voting precincts, rather than individuals nested within them, to treatment and control groups. Not only is it easier and...

Do presidential campaign advertisements mobilize, inform, or persuade citizens? To answer this question we exploit a natural experiment, the accidental treatment of some individuals living in nonbattleground states during the 2000 presidential election to either high levels or one-sided barrages...

In the social sciences, randomized experimentation is the optimal research design for establishing causation. However, for a number of practical reasons, researchers are sometimes unable to conduct experiments and must rely on observational data. In an effort to develop estimators that can...

Presidential elections provide both an important context in which to study advertising and a setting that mitigates the challenges of dynamics and endogeneity. We use the 2000 and 2004 general elections to analyze the effect of market-level advertising on county-level vote shares. The results...

Presidential candidates purchase advertising based on each state’s potential to tip the election. The structure of the Electoral College concentrates spending in battleground states, such that a majority of voters are ignored. We estimate an equilibrium model of multimarket advertising...

Presidential elections provide both an important context in which to study advertising and a setting that mitigates the challenges of dynamics and endogeneity. We use the 2000 and 2004 general elections to analyze the effect of market-level advertising on county-level vote shares. The results...