Those who seek to increase electoral participation appear to face a dilemma. Prior work finds that Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) interventions are more effective on individuals with ex-ante higher voting propensities and might hence deepen turnout inequality. In this paper, we formalise the link between differential mobilisation effects and turnout inequality, introduce a novel Gini-based turnout inequality measure, and comprehensively answer if and when GOTV interventions increase or decrease turnout inequality.

We formally prove that, where electorates are stratified, interventions resulting in constant treatment effects, or even in larger effects among higher voting propensity groups, can reduce turnout inequality. To test the effects of GOTV on turnout inequality empirically, we collect the largest individual-level experimental dataset for political science meta-analysis, and estimate treatment effects within voting propensity bins.

We find that GOTV interventions are most effective on intermediate-propensity voters. We then show that by reducing the over-representation of high-propensity voters, GOTV reduces the turnout inequality Gini, especially in high inequality contexts. These findings revise established knowledge on the link between voter mobilisation and turnout inequality, and have powerful implications for democracy and the ethics of political science experimentation.

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Please email comms@sociology.ox.ac.uk with any questions.