{"title":"\"Don't you plan on voting?\" The motives and effects of peer pressure in voter mobilization.","authors":"Woojin Kim","doi":"10.1561/100.00024022","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper studies the motives behind socially pressuring others in the context of voter mobilization. In this online experiment, college students choose whether to send an email that pressures their campus peers to register to vote for the 2020 U.S. Elections. The senders have a negative average willingness-to-pay (WTP) to send the email, meaning they would rather pay than pressure their peers. The experiment reveals two counteracting motives at play. On the positive side, senders believe that pressuring their peers will persuade them to register. On the negative side, they believe that their peers will dislike being pressured, which outweighs the positive motives. However, under anonymous messaging, they become much less sensitive to whether the recipient dislikes being pressured, and their average WTP turns positive. This pattern of behavior reflects voters who are motivated by the prospect of mobilizing their peers, but are restrained by self-interested concerns from social costs or retaliation.</p>","PeriodicalId":51622,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Political Science","volume":"20 2","pages":"231-268"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12346736/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Quarterly Journal of Political Science","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00024022","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/4/14 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper studies the motives behind socially pressuring others in the context of voter mobilization. In this online experiment, college students choose whether to send an email that pressures their campus peers to register to vote for the 2020 U.S. Elections. The senders have a negative average willingness-to-pay (WTP) to send the email, meaning they would rather pay than pressure their peers. The experiment reveals two counteracting motives at play. On the positive side, senders believe that pressuring their peers will persuade them to register. On the negative side, they believe that their peers will dislike being pressured, which outweighs the positive motives. However, under anonymous messaging, they become much less sensitive to whether the recipient dislikes being pressured, and their average WTP turns positive. This pattern of behavior reflects voters who are motivated by the prospect of mobilizing their peers, but are restrained by self-interested concerns from social costs or retaliation.
期刊介绍：
In the last half-century, social scientists have engaged in a methodologically focused and substantively far-reaching mission to make the study of politics scientific. The mutually reinforcing components in this pursuit are the development of positive theories and the testing of their empirical implications. Although this paradigm has been associated with many advances in the understanding of politics, no leading journal of political science is dedicated primarily to the publication of positive political science.
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