A Megastudy of Behavioral Interventions to Increase Voter Registration Ahead of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: In the United States, voter registration is required for participation in most elections, yet many eligible individuals remain unregistered. Relatively little is known about how to increase the likelihood that an eligible adult registers to vote. We evaluated 10 expert-crowdsourced interventions among eligible but unregistered U.S. voters (N = 12,927) in an online survey experiment conducted before the 2024 presidential election. The study was powered to detect small attitudinal effects and effects on voter registration and turnout of roughly 3 percentage points. Nine interventions increased self-reported voting intentions, and five increased clicks on the official voter registration website. Escalating Commitment, a social pressure strategy, produced the largest absolute effect on these proximal outcomes. However, none of the interventions significantly increased voter registration or turnout. These findings highlight the challenge of translating shifts in intention into registration behavior, but also identify potentially promising messaging strategies for future large-scale field evaluation.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Authors: Claire Robertson, vincent pons, Noah M. Laskey, Todd Rogers, John Jost, Jonathan Bogard, James Druckman, Wooyoung Choi, Madalina Vlasceanu, Katherine Anne Mason, Andrea G. Dittmann, Don Green, Danielle Cosme, Jasmine I. Sanchez, Hannah Birnbaum, Ekaterina Y. Goncharova, Danielle Goldwert, Spike W. S. Lee, Noah Goldstein, Wendy De La Rosa, Kayley Okst, Eric Knowles, Craig R. Fox, Jackson G. Lu, Joseph Reiff, Craig Brimhall, Sara M. Constantino, Megan Weber, Erika Weisz, Hannah Waldfogel, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Yash Patel, Emily Falk, Robb Willer, Aneesh Rai, Jan G. Voelkel, Rohan Garg
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7161096924