Reaching Returning Voters through Social Ties

About this event

People with past criminal convictions register and vote at very low rates and are difficult to contact for mobilization efforts: they are residentially mobile, hard to find, and often skeptical of politics. In this study, we test a new approach to finding and contacting such hard-to-reach voters, asking whether people from their own lives might make better political messengers than strangers from civic organizations. We used administrative data to build a large mailing list of eligible but unregistered voters with past felony convictions in Texas. In a field experiment during the 2022 election season, we mailed out information about registration and voting. Some people were directly contacted with encouragement to register, while for other people we instead sent the registration materials to their already-registered household members with an encouragement to help people in their lives register; we test whether this household- connections approach can work as well as direct appeals to register and vote. Our study has practical use for civic-engagement efforts and also extends our understanding of how social connections and “relational organizing” can foster political engagement, particularly among otherwise-unlikely-to-participate groups.