Priority Theme Spotlight: Romain Ferrali, Guy Grossman, and Horacio Larreguy
Author: Ayuko Picot
Theme: Democracy, Conflict, & Polarization
In today’s Priority Theme Spotlight, we feature EGAP members, Guy Grossman (University of Pennsylvania) and Horacio Larreguy (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México) along with their co-author and scientific director of Tafra, Romain Ferrali (Aix-Marseille University). We asked them about their working paper, “Can low-cost, scalable, online interventions increase youth informed political participation in electoral authoritarian contexts?”
The study examines the effects of three interventions carried out by Tafra, a Moroccan non-partisan civil society organization, on youth turnout and party preferences ahead of the 2021 parliamentary elections in Morocco. Study participants were randomly assigned to one of the three online interventions aimed at lowering participation barriers to voting: 1) support with the voter registration process; 2) a civic education video highlighting the importance of voting; and 3) an online quiz to identify one’s most congruent party.
The research team finds that the short video and online quiz increased turnout intentions for a subset of participants labeled “conditional voters,” or citizens who are ambivalent about voting and can be nudged to vote if exposed to a treatment. In addition, the online quiz affected vote choice by switching party preferences of some participants to parties that better matched their policy preferences. On average, the interventions did not have a significant effect on youth voter turnout. We asked the research team about their intervention and findings from the project.
What explains low youth participation in elections, and why is increasing their turnout important?
Romain Ferrali, Guy Grossman, and Horacio Larreguy: Throughout the world, young citizens tend to turn out to vote at lower rates than older citizens. We believe that impediments to voting can originate from three sources. First, the cost of voting may be too high; that is, the administrative formalities and the effort required to learn about candidates’ platforms are too cumbersome. Second, the perceived material benefits from voting may be too low. This can be due to cynicism (“politics doesn’t matter for my life”) or to genuine information gaps (youth being largely ignorant of party positions, and parties correspondingly appearing not different enough from one another to justify the cost of participation). Third, especially in authoritarian settings, citizens may lack the set of norms and beliefs – a sense of “civic duty” – that encourages people to turn out to vote.
While the three abovementioned barriers presumably hinder turnout in general, and youth turnout in particular, in various degrees, our study does not aim at highlighting which of these is the most important impediment to voting. Rather, it aims at identifying which of these barriers can be addressed using a cheap and scalable online intervention to improve youth turnout and informed voting.
You conducted your research project in Morocco, a country rated “partly free” by Freedom House. Can you elaborate a bit more on the political context there, and how regime type affects barriers to electoral participation?
RF, GG, and HL: Morocco is a constitutional monarchy, in which an elected Parliament sits next to a King that exerts significant power. This context depresses turnout by lowering the stakes to the elections, with first- and second-order impediments. The first-order impediment is straightforward: why turn out to vote and elect a body that does not enjoy full power? The second-order impediment is that in an environment where elections do not grant full access to power, parties have insufficient incentive to spend resources to court groups like youth who vote at low rates. As such, many citizens (and especially youth) are insufficiently informed about party platforms, hence leading them to believe that parties “all look the same.” Interestingly, all but one party released their program three weeks before the election, and one week before the beginning of the campaign.
Party behavior compounds with government behavior in depressing turnout: the 2021 election was marked by shorter, poorly advertised campaigns to register voters on the voter file. Rules surrounding campaigning rules are restrictive: the campaign itself is short (two weeks for the 2021 elections), and opinion polls are prohibited for a period of one month before the election. Still, we ought to care about increasing youth turnout in countries such as Morocco, in part, because past work suggests that elections can improve policy congruence between citizens and public officials even in autocratic settings.
The project was a result of a collaboration between the research team and Tafra. How did you establish your partnership with Tafra? What were some obstacles (if any) in implementing this intervention?
RF, GG, and HL: Tafra is a civil society organization that was founded in 2014 in Rabat. Its goal is to foster accountability and evidence-based policymaking in Morocco. In 2020, Tafra was looking for ways to improve youth turnout in the then-upcoming elections. Online interventions around elections have turned into a staple, as they are relatively cheap to implement. Unsure about which of the barriers we mentioned above is most binding, Tafra was hesitant as to which intervention to carry out. As such, the organization realized the need to evaluate a series of interventions, in order to help it identify which would be most efficient. Romain Ferrali, the scientific director of Tafra, got in touch with Guy Grossman and Horacio Larreguy. Together, they designed this evaluation.
The intervention went smoothly, although the research team ran into a few hurdles. First, rules surrounding political advertisement on Facebook can be rather frustrating. Specific reasons for advertising campaigns being turned down tend to be unclear, and difficult to appeal, in situations where every second counts. Second, Morocco has strict capital controls, preventing Tafra from making several important purchases (e.g., online API to transfer phone minutes to participants as compensation). Finally, Morocco recently reinforced its legal arsenal regarding the protection of personal data. While the requirements are standard by international benchmarks (e.g., similar to EU regulation, data should be stored on servers located in Morocco), this also implies that commonly used tools may not be legal (e.g., while Qualtrics provides the option to store data in EU servers, it does not provide the option to store data in Moroccan servers).
In your analysis, you divide the study participants into three groups – conditional voters, unconditional voters and non-voters building on Rolfe’s (2012) framework. Your results show different effects of the interventions on each group type. Can you describe the three groups briefly, and share how the interventions impacted each group’s voting behavior?
RF, GG, and HL: As mentioned above, we think of the decision to vote as a cost-benefit analysis. Only those for whom the net benefit of voting is positive turn out to vote. From this, we can imagine three groups: those for whom the net benefit of voting is positive, and would have turnout out irrespective of our interventions (“unconditional voters”); those for whom the net benefit of voting is so negative that light-touched interventions such as ours are insufficient to push them to vote ( “unconditional non-voters”), and finally those whose net benefit of voting is negative, but not so low that our light-touched interventions may nudge into voting. We code study participants as conditional voters, if they stated they were unsure as to whether they would turn out prior to our interventions. We found that two of our interventions (the civic education video and the online quiz) managed to increase the turnout intention of this group and (understandably) had no effect on the other two. The last intervention (support in the voter registration process) had no effect on any group, probably because the implementation was not user-friendly (because of limitations imposed by the government).
Additionally, we found that an online tool that we developed to allow identifying one’s most congruent party from a policy perspective, switched the party preferences of some participants to parties that better matched their policy preferences, with effects lasting long enough to impact actual vote choice. This only worked, however, when the recommendation provided was not too far from the participant’s initial beliefs. Furthermore, it seems that participants mostly paid attention to the bottom-line recommendation of the tool, without paying attention to the details of the recommendation it provided.
What are the implications of these findings for organizations implementing online campaigns to increase political participation?
RF, GG, and HL: Online campaigns to increase political participation seem attractive at first sight, as they have the ability to reach many citizens at a low cost. But are they effective? Our findings suggest that they can be, if done right. First, they need to be adapted to the internet age: in a world where many sources of content fight for our attention and where politics is less interesting than cat videos, the user experience needs to be flawless. Second, they need to target people that these kinds of lightweight interventions can move. Finding ways to identify those that are uncertain about their decision to turn out from their demographics is key. Finally, some ways of encouraging turnout, such as our online tool, may also affect the target population’s underlying political preferences. While this is a noble goal, the target population may view those recommendations with too much skepticism if they are too different from their initial beliefs or, in the internet age, consume them so uncritically that we get dangerously close to manipulation.