Frequent Voters More Responsive, Partisan Affiliation Doesn't Matter: Evidence from Water Conservation Experiment

Political Behavior @AJPS 1 dataset Dataverse

This study investigates whether voters and non-voters respond differently to pro-social water conservation messages in a large-scale randomized controlled trial. During the 2016 Southeast drought, half of 35,000 targeted households received randomly assigned encouragement for water conservation.

Key Findings:

Households with frequent voter histories (primary/general elections from 1990-2008) showed significantly higher responsiveness to the pro-social messages. This suggests that citizens who participate regularly in electoral processes may demonstrate stronger commitment to collective action and public goods contributions.
There was no statistically significant difference in conservation responses between Republican and Democrat households, despite partisanship being a common political variable expected to influence behavior.

Why It Matters:

These findings provide empirical evidence for the connection between voting frequency and engagement with other cooperative behaviors. The results indicate that pro-social messaging may be more effective if tailored towards informed citizens who frequently participate in democratic processes.

Article card for article: Are Voters More Likely to Contribute to Other Public Goods: Evidence from a Large-Scale Randomized Policy Experiment

Are Voters More Likely to Contribute to Other Public Goods: Evidence from a Large-Scale Randomized Policy Experiment was authored by Toby Bolsen, Paul J. Ferraro and Juan Jose Miranda. It was published by Wiley in AJPS in 2014.