Mega-study Testing Behavioral Interventions to Increase Voter Registration: Call for collaborators

Last call for collaborators for the Global Many Labs Cooperation Project

Voting in elections is one of the most consequential actions of political participation in a democracy, as elected leaders’ agendas can have widespread national and global effects (Aldrich, 1993). However, only 62.5% of the voting age population voted in the 2020 United States Presidential election, the percentages being even lower in the 2016 (i.e., 59.2%) or the 2012 elections (i.e., 58%) (Pew, 2020).

Decades of research testing interventions aimed at increasing voting turnout (Green & Gerber, 2019) pointed to several promising strategies, such as nudging implementation intentions (Nickerson & Rogers, 2010), emphasizing social norms (Gerber & Rogers, 2009), triggering social pressure (Rogers, Green, Ternovski, & Young, 2017), or expressing gratitude (Panagopoulos, 2011). However, these interventions have not been tested against each other in the same experiment, hindering the ability to make direct comparisons between strategies (Benartzi et al., 2017). 

We are sharing news about a large megastudy designed to identify and test the top behavioral interventions aimed at increasing voter registration in United States elections, in a large randomized controlled experiment. Their dependent variable is online voter registration ahead of the 2024 US presidential election. 

You can become our coauthor by submitting one of the interventions they select for testing. 

Each submitted intervention should adhere to the following criteria (Voelkel et al., 2024):

·       Ethical: Must receive approval from our Institutional Review Board.

·       Online Deployment: The intervention should be executable online, through the Qualtrics Platform.

·       Scalability: Capable of reaching and impacting a large audience simultaneously.

·       Brevity: The intervention must not exceed 5 minutes in duration.

·       Clarity: Easily comprehensible to an English-speaking audience.

·       Cost-Effectiveness: Should not involve monetary incentives for participants.

·       Alignment: Cannot require additional measures beyond the scope of the study.

·       Specificity: Must specifically target voter registration in the USA.

To join the project, submit your intervention using this link by September 1st using this form: https://forms.gle/vS7cfuNhGQvk8d9p6

For any questions, contact Madalina Vlasceanu, Sara Constantino, Robb Willer, Don Green, or Todd Rogers.

Please share this with anyone who might be interested.