The Effect of Priming Racial In-Group Norms of Participation and Racial Group Conflict on Black Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment

This paper examines the effectiveness of racialized Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) messages at mobilizing black voters. Here we use a mail-based voter mobilization experiment containing 134,000 black registered voters conducted during 2008 North Carolina Democratic Presidential primary to test two different explanations for how racialized voter mobilization messages might increase black voter turnout (in the context of a campaign featuring a viable black presidential candidate). The first test examines the effectiveness of GOTV messages that prime simple in-group norms of voting (i.e., other blacks vote or don’t) at increasing black voter turnout. The second test examines the effectiveness of GOTV messages that highlight black advantage/disadvantage in black/white electoral competition (i.e., blacks turnout at higher rates than white or vice versa). While we find little evidence that priming in-group norms of voting has any effect on black turnout, we do however find that racial group conflict messages highlighting black disadvantage in political competition with whites had the unsettling effect of demobilizing black voters.