Effects of Telephone Canvassing on Turnout and Preferences: A Field Experiment

IN DECIDING how to allocate campaign resources, strategists have remarkably little scholarly research available on the effects of particular kinds of campaign activities. The large volume of electionrelated research includes few attempts to isolate and examine the impact of specific tactics. As grass-roots party organizations atrophy, efforts to get out the vote are increasingly conducted over the telephone, rather than house-to-house, and are often run by paid workers rather than by volunteers. Despite the large sums of money invested in these telephone operations, clear tests of their effectiveness have not been published. Instead, most research in this area concerns the effects of party activity, broadly construed, on elections in the 1950s (Eldersveld, 1956; Wolfinger, 1963; Crotty, 1971). Aside from Eldersveld's finding that personal contact was somewhat more effective than letters in increasing turnout, the effects of particular tactics were not examined. One study that did specifically address the impact of door-to-door canvassing was that of Gerald Kramer (1970-71). Using 1952 through 1964 SRC election surveys and controlling for a variety of sociodemographic characteristics, Kramer used maximum-likelihood methods to estimate the consequences of such canvassing.' Aside