Canvassing

Reaching back a bit to the Nickerson article "Is Voting Contagious?," I began to connect some of the claims made therein to my own experiences canvassing (the act of going door to door to promote a certain candidate or party) as a planned parenthood representative for president Obama and later for a couple other local candidates. Essentially, as the article accurately describes, "The labor pool consisted of area college students, who typically had little experience in canvassing but were carefully trained" (51).

While I can see how students knocking on the door with a script can be influential, I wonder if influence declines in neighborhoods that are canvassed regularly like one of the ones I was in. There, the residents were all so used to people walking around, stopping them on the street, and ringing their doorbells that many of them were annoyed at being bothered so much. Some went so far as to dismantle their doorbells for the duration of the campaign. The emotional reaction of residents could actually work against the political party, since the residents will start to associate a campaign with their feelings of annoyance. Also, canvassers do not just go out on weekends, and I wonder if the decrease in stay at home parents would impact the dissemination of material? Third, many times, when walking up to the door, it is apparent that there is a person at home, and that they are staring at you from behind their curtains but refuse to come to the door. An interesting study could be done to see if just seeing a canvasser without actually interacting influences someone to vote. It seems as if the presence of people whose mission is wrapped up in elections and are usually wearing some kind of political T-shirts, must at least be another physical reminder of the upcoming election. Indeed, I'm sure that the inundation of canvassers in a particular area have also sparked many conversations if only to complain about their persistence, which contributes to the voter turn out, if indirectly, as well. Lastly, whether or not the canvasser talks to the residences, the material left behind might be so eye catching and persuasive that it is the reason for an increase in voter probability and not the canvasser. Nickerson does write, "Unlike past studies of interpersonal influence, the placebo-controlled experiments isolate peer effects from selection processes and omitted variables to provide an unbiased estimate of the contagiousness of voter turnout within these households"(54). However, I think I am still a bit skeptical of whether or not people can adequately account for different mitigating factors or make the experiment truly "unbiased."