Foot-in-the-door strategy during a political canvassing in La Plata. Experimental Evidence from Argentina

The intervention has two different parts: specific political publicity that aims the candidate to be known by everyone in the neighborhood and a door-to-door canvassing which main objective is to establish a bond with the voter and maintain the link until the day of general elections at least.

The intervention has two different parts: specific political publicity that aims the candidate to be known by everyone in the neighborhood and a door-to-door canvassing which main objective is to establish a bond with the voter and maintain the link until the day of general elections at least.

Door to door canvassing

To ensure that the intervention would be administered uniformly, only the candidate can visit the voters. One of the main difference with others interventions is that the visits are done by a candidate nor an activist.

To start and lead the conversations during the visit the candidate used persuasive strategy techniques to encourage people to be part of the intervention. He began asking to voters if they can identify some social issues in their nearly neighborhood. Later, he provided basic information about council city functions. As the candidate is an actual member of the city council he is able to present any complaint or request in the name of any member of the community.

Future contacts after visits were managed by the same person, who was instructed to contact voters by Whatsapp and gave them specific information about their complaints or requests to ensure a frequently contact with the voters. In this instance, we conducted surveys by phone and asked about public and social recognition, acknowledgement and appreciation of different candidates. This information provided evidence of the impact of the intervention.

Unlike others studies of door-to-door canvasing, our intervention implies several contacts with the treatment group. The experiment started on 18th February and is finishing on 8th August, the last day of the canvassing before the primary elections. During more than six months, the candidate made a personal visit every two months and whatsapp contacts every month to maintain the bond created in the first visit.

The campaign team estimated that the visits will done three days per week, clearing a polling station out per day. Once they have visited all the territory, they will start again with a second round and then with third one. They estimated that 25% in average will be in agreement with the visit.

Publicity

First of all, we have to differentiate the general campaign publicity that comprises the political coalition the candidate belongs to and the political advertisement in the inner experiment. The candidates’ publicity was exclusively developed for the experiment.

On the other hand, the general coalition advertising in La Plata has started in December 2018. To preserve the intervention area of our experiment, we set exclusions zones for about 1100 meters around the electoral building where there are no type of political publicity in favor of the candidate. In addition, the telephone contact in the candidate’s advertisement is unique which allow us to identify which type of publicity the neighbor has seen.

The 18th of February will take place the intervention in the eligible territory. Taking into account the content of the political proposal, the expectations of the electorate, the personal characteristics, the budget of the campaign, the personality of the candidate and the political conjuncture, the campaign team defined three impersonal techniques: flyers under the door, posters in public places in the defined territory and stickers.

The material used in the intervention is appropriate to every single neighborhood. Through the emission of images and transmission of interpersonal symbols they are prepared to create a virtual contact between the candidate and the voter. As the candidate is compete for an elected position at the municipal level, it is imperative to create a link between the name of the candidate and the coalition he is belong.

The canvassing techniques are dedicated exclusively to the door-to-door campaign. Furthermore, phone and email contacts are unique to the intervention after which we could have a measure of the contamination of other publicity. It is also allows us to survey treated households and have a measure of the intervention strategies to get-out-the-vote.

2019-02-18

2019-08-11

Our main outcome is the percentage of treated voters in each polling station

(1) the number of complaints and requests made by the candidate and voters;
(2) the number of direct contacts made by voters;
(3) a dummy variable that reflects if voter participate in any City Council Session, and
(4) a dummy variable to capture social involvement at neighborhood level like neighborhoods’ meetings.

first place we settle on the territory where the intervention can be done. Regardless of the 255 authorized polling stations the 8th electoral section has, we were allowed to run the experiment in only 50.
We consider target households to every house which location is at most two blocks from each eligible polling place.
The units of analysis are the polling stations at the polling places.

first place we settle on the territory where the intervention can be done. Before the randomization took place, the campaign team determined the polling places where they can visit without interfere in the general political canvassing. Regardless of the 255 authorized polling stations the 8th electoral section has, we were allowed to run the experiment in only 50 (approximate 20%).
We consider target households to every house which location is at most two blocks from each eligible polling place.
The units of analysis are the polling stations at the polling places.

Random numbers with Stata

We first divided the eligible territory in 4 strata: the Metropolitan area, the North (Tolosa, Ringuelet, Gonnet and City Bell), the West (Los Hornos and Lisandro Olmos) and the South (Villa Elvira, San Lorenzo and Arana).
Randomization was done within each strata. We randomly select polling places equally to the treatment and control groups, using random numbers in Stata.

As we have already defined the target number of households in each territory, the population is every voter who lives in the eligible territory and vote in that polling place.

Yes

36 groups of polling stations and 268 polling stations

5,000 voters

18 groups of polling places publicity treatment
18 groups of polling places door-to-door and publicity treatment