Are Social Media Campaigns Effective at Mobilizing Young Voters?

• In Event: Field and Natural Experiments on Democratic Participation

Abstract

Voter registration among young people is significantly lower and they turn out less than older voters. Moreover, they are hard to reach with conventional registration methods such as canvassing and direct mail. As of late there have been large-scale attempts to register and mobilize young voters via social media campaigns on various platforms, both by partisan and non-partisan actors. However, there is a lot of scepticism regarding whether social media campaigns are effective, and whether newly registered young voters will actually turn out once registered to vote. The experimental literature suggests that the effect of social media ads on persuasion and mobilization are positive, but small (Bond 2012, Hager 2019).

In this pre-registered field experiment (https://egap.org/registration/6331), we worked with a non-partisan organisation to test if their social media registration drive featuring well-known social media influencers on Instagram and Snapchat was effective at registering young people to vote in the 2019 UK General Election, and if a GOTV reminders via social media 1-2 days before the election amplified the campaign’s effect on turnout. In a large-scale RCT – the first of its kind - we assigned 879 postcode sectors located within 40 parliamentary constituencies to four groups based on a fully factorial 2x2 design: control, one group that received voter registration video ads, one group that received turnout encouragement video ads, and one group that received both. These messages were targeted towards young people aged 18-35 years.

We collect voter registration and validated turnout data from official public voter registers to test whether social media campaigns targeted towards young people can increase voter registration and turnout. The results of this field experiment will contribute to our understanding of the role social media can play in engaging hard-to-reach groups in the electoral process.

Authors

• Florian Foos, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Peter Charles John, King's College London

• Asli Unan, King's College London