Pushing Too Hard: Using Door-in-the-Face to Get Voters out the Door

Get-out-the-vote campaigns have utilized a variety of tools and techniques to encourage registered voters to participate on election day. This paper reports the results of a study that uses two randomized field experiments to test the viability of the door-in-the-face (DITF) technique developed by Cialdini et al. (1975) as a way to increase voter turnout. The first experiment was a small pilot conducted in November 2010 among registered voters who are students at a college in the western United States. The second, larger-scale experiment was conducted in November 2011 with registered voters in San Mateo County, California. Results from both the pilot and full field experiments suggest that DITF is not an effective tactic for increasing voter turnout. Voters receiving a simple get-out-the-vote script were more likely to vote than were those in the control group, but voters receiving the DITF script were no more likely to cast ballots.