Partisan and Nonpartisan Message Content and Voter Mobilization

This article reports the results of a randomized field experiment designed to compare directly the mobilization impact of partisan versus nonpartisan messages delivered via commercial phone banks. The experiment, conducted during the November 2005 municipal elections in Albany, New York, incorporates a series of design innovations to improve on extant research and to assuage skepticism about the internal and external validity of previous studies conducted along these lines. The author finds that partisan messages delivered by professional call centers are no more effective than nonpartisan messages in mobilizing voters.

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