Hunting the Elusive Young Voter

Abstract It is generally assumed that mobilizing young voters is infeasible. This belief can be broken into two separate questions: (1) Are young people responsive to Get Out The Vote appeals? (2) Is it possible to deliver the message to the intended audience? By pooling together the results of six GOTV field experiments, this paper demonstrates that young voters are equally responsive to blandishments to vote as mature voters, but that they are roughly three times more difficult to contact.

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