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Donald Green and Alan Gerber

Summary

Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber are American political scientists whose co-authored Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout (Brookings, four editions from 2004 to 2019) is the canonical empirical synthesis of the randomised-controlled-trial evidence on what actually raises voter turnout. Their work grounds the practitioner discipline of ranking voter-contact methods by measured effect size.

Key idea in this wiki

  • The GOTV experimental literature is the empirical evidence base voter-contact-and-gotv draws on when ranking tactics by effectiveness: face-to-face canvassing > phone banking > direct mail > robocalls > leaflets; Get Out the Vote aggregates hundreds of field experiments from the 1950s through the 2010s and reports the same effect-size hierarchy [source: get-out-the-vote]. The VoteEuropa 2024 GOTV Toolkit translates the Green-Gerber effect-size hierarchy into a contemporary EU-election practitioner handbook [source: voteeuropa-gotv].
  • The Green-Gerber effect-size hierarchy is the basis for the Wins-Above-Replacement (W.A.R.) framing the analyst-institute practitioner curriculum uses to translate academic effect sizes into budget-allocation decisions.
  • The discipline Green and Gerber established — only RCT evidence counts for voter-contact decisions — underwrites the wiki’s empirical-claims standard for research-methods in the electoral context.
  • The book is also a key reference for the wiki’s peer-to-peer-texting and phone-banking concept pages, which cite the experimental hierarchy [source: get-out-the-vote].

Why campaigners read them

Campaigners read Green and Gerber because the effect-size hierarchy (face-to-face canvassing > phone banking > direct mail > robocalls > leaflets) is a budget-allocation finding, not a ranking by impressiveness; door-knocking dominates because the effect size is large and replicable [source: get-out-the-vote]. The wiki uses the hierarchy in voter-contact-and-gotv as the ranking a campaigner asks where should my last $10K go? about — and pairs it with analyst-institute and thinkers/sasha-issenberg as the academic/practitioner pair. The empirical discipline — only RCT evidence counts for voter-contact decisions — is the wiki’s standard for research-methods and the most-cited rebuttal to spending on tactics that feel effective but are not measured. The cross-border generalisability is the working question for voteeuropa-gotv [source: voteeuropa-gotv].

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Open Questions

  • The Green-Gerber empirical hierarchy is well-established for the US context; the cross-jurisdiction evidence base (e.g. the VoteEuropa 2024 GOTV Toolkit) is the natural extension the wiki would benefit from.

Sources & verification

Last verified: 2026-07-08