Are Electronic Media Any Good at Getting Out the Vote?

An expert on maximizing voter participation says other methods are better and more cost-effective

Show Notes

In Get Out the Vote, co-authors Donald Green and Alan Gerber argue that political consultants and campaign managers have underappreciated boots-on-the-ground canvassing in person and on the phone, in favor of less personal, more easily-scaled methods—radio and TV advertising, robocalling, mass mailings, and the like. Unlike campaign professionals, they base their case with real data, based on experimental research. Donald Green is a political scientist at Columbia University focusing on such issues as voting behavior and partisanship, and most importantly, methodologies for studying politics and elections. 

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Fixing the Future from IEEE Spectrum magazine is a biweekly look at the cultural, business, and environmental consequences of technological solutions to hard problems like sustainability, climate change, and the ethics and scientific challenges posed by AI. IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine of IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences.