Is Voting Habit Forming? The Longitudinal Impact of a GOTV Campaign in the UK.

This paper examines whether voters mobilized by a Get Out The Vote (GOTV) campaign continue to turn out in a subsequent election. It thereby tests the extent to which they gain the habit of voting. The research examined electoral registers in the 2006 English local elections in the constituency of Wythenshawe and Sale East. This was the site of John and Brannan's (2007) GOTV experiment, which had compared the impact of telephoning and door-to-door canvassing in the 2005 General Election. Descriptive statistics show that the downstream effect of the treatment was quite small at 3% in 2006. But the habit effect was large. Voting in 2005 raised the probability of voting in 2006 by more than half. Regression analysis confirms the size of the habit effect. The paper discusses the limitations of sample size in making statistical inferences about the prevalence of the habit effect in one location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]