Get Out The Vote! (Donald Green & Alan Gerber)
Summary
Donald Green & Alan Gerber’s Get Out The Vote! How to Increase Voter Turnout (Brookings, 2008; 4th ed. 2019) is the definitive empirical synthesis of randomized-controlled trials of voter-mobilization tactics. The book ranks tactics by measured effect size: face-to-face canvassing > phone banking > direct mail > leaflets. It is the empirical anchor of voter-contact-and-gotv.
Body
Donald Green and Alan Gerber’s Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout (Brookings Institution Press) is the canonical academic book on voter-mobilisation science, now in its expanded fourth edition covering data through the 2020 US presidential campaign [source: get-out-the-vote]. The book’s central question - what works to get voters to the polls - has been answered through decades of randomised controlled trials embedded in actual campaigns, and the book has become the reference text for those who manage campaigns and study voter mobilisation [source: get-out-the-vote]. The book is widely cited in campaign-manager training and is one of the standard practitioner-academic bridges in US electioneering [source: get-out-the-vote].
Coverage: the first three editions broke ground by introducing a scientific approach to GOTV; the new edition incorporates data from a trove of recent studies that shed new light on the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of various campaign tactics, including door-to-door canvassing, e-mail, direct mail, and telephone calls [source: get-out-the-vote]. The new edition also gives special attention to relational organising through friend-to-friend communication and events, which has become the dominant paradigm in digital campaign-mobilisation since 2016 [source: get-out-the-vote]. The book is widely reviewed (Alan Krueger in the New York Times called it “bound to become a bible for politicians and activists of all stripes”) and is one of the most-assigned books in US campaign-management courses [source: get-out-the-vote].
A campaigner reaches for it as the academic reference for any GOTV-effectiveness claim, when designing a voter-mobilisation programme in the Green/Gerber RCT tradition, or when citing the cost-effectiveness ranking of tactics in a campaign plan [source: get-out-the-vote]. Treat the book itself as link-only (Brookings copyright); quote the published effect sizes as the canonical reference points. [source: get-out-the-vote]
Use it for
Citing the empirical ranking of GOTV tactics; justifying budget allocation across voter-contact methods; designing and interpreting RCTs in campaign evaluation.
Related
- affinity-groups
- civil-resistance
- coalition-building
- constructive-programme
- distributed-organizing
- leadership-development
- one-to-ones
- power-mapping
- public-narrative
- theory-of-change
- three-and-a-half-percent-rule
Learn more
- On Wikipedia: Donald Green — CC BY-SA 4.0