The psychology of electoral mobilization: a subtle
priming experiment
Martin Nyhuisa
, Jordy F. Gosselta
and Martin Rosemab
a
Department of Communication Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands;
b
Centre for the Study of Democracy, Department of Public Administration, School of
Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences, University of Twente, Enschede,
The Netherlands
ABSTRACT
In this paper we test the idea that citizens can be stimulated to vote in an
election via subtle psychological processes, which have little or nothing to do
with the act of voting as such. More speciﬁcally, we argue that presenting
voters with stimuli that induce an active mood will increase their tendency to
vote. We conducted an experiment to test our ideas. Participants were subtly
primed by giving them a campaign leaﬂet that contained a word puzzle,
which included words that are associated with either action or inaction. The
results indicate that subtly primed participants in the action condition
reported stronger voting intentions than those in the inaction condition.
These ﬁndings suggest that individuals can indeed be stimulated (or
inhibited) to vote through subtle psychological processes. We discuss the
implications of our results for the study of voting behaviour as well as
campaigns aimed at electoral mobilization.
Introduction
There is presumably no form of political behaviour that has received more
scholarly attention than the act of voting. Researchers have identiﬁed numerous
factors that inﬂuence citizens’ decision to vote or abstain, including many
individual-level characteristics of voters as well as a range of contextual factors
related to the political and electoral system (for reviews and a meta-analysis,
see Harder and Krosnick 2008; Smets and van Ham 2013). Furthermore, many
experimental studies have been conducted to assess the effectiveness of campaign
activities that are aimed at increasing electoral turnout, such as direct
mail, door-to-door canvassing, and phone calls (for a review and meta-analysis,
see Green, McGrath, and Aronow 2013). The interventions that have been
studied in these experiments vary in many ways, but usually have one feature
© 2016 Elections, Public Opinion & Parties
CONTACT Martin Rosema m.rosema@utwente.nl Centre for the Study of Democracy, Department
of Public Administration, School of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences, University of Twente,
P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at 10.1080/17457289.2016.1160909.
JOURNAL OF ELECTIONS, PUBLIC OPINION AND PARTIES, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2016.1160909
in common: there is no doubt about the fact that the aim of the stimuli presented
to citizens is to mobilize voters. In this paper we shift our attention to
another way in which voters may be stimulated to vote, namely through
subtle priming. We argue that the decision to vote is inﬂuenced not only by
thoughts and feelings about the political parties and their candidates or the
act of voting, but also by psychological processes that seemingly have little
or nothing to do with politics per se and which citizens do not associate
with voting. More speciﬁcally, whether individuals are in an active or
passive mood, which may be inﬂuenced by a whole range of non-political
factors, can inﬂuence their decision to vote. If we increase our insight in
such psychological processes, which we have attempted to do with an experiment
that is presented in this paper, this opens up fascinating new possibilities
for campaigns aimed at electoral mobilization.
The best-known studies that focus on attempts to increase electoral
turnout are undoubtedly the seminal ﬁeld experiments in the United States
described by Gerber and Green (2000, 2001) and Green and Gerber (2008).
They assessed the impact of a wide range of get-out-the-vote activities,
such as door-to-door canvassing, leaﬂeting, direct mail, electronic mail, and
phone calls. Although the evidence was sometimes mixed and not all ﬁndings
have remained unchallenged, the overall image that emerges from these
studies is that such activities do have an effect, although the size is limited,
and more a personal approach has a better chance to affect voters than an
impersonal approach (Green and Gerber 2008). In local elections, too, such
mobilization effects have been observed (Gerber, Green, and Nickerson
2003). Furthermore, the effects of such campaigns are not limited to citizens
that are contacted but spread towards other members in the same household
(Nickerson 2008). Moreover, many such effects have also been observed in
other political contexts (e.g. John and Brennan 2008; Fieldhouse et al.
2013). For example, Karp and Banducci (2007) found no substantive differences
between older and newer democracies regarding the electoral mobilization
of citizens by political parties. However, there are also indications that
mobilization effects differ across contexts. For example, certain mobilization
effects may be stronger in candidate-centred elections than in partycentred
elections under proportional representation (Karp, Banducci, and
Bowler 2007). Although much is known, there is still a need in particular for
systematic comparative research about mobilization effects (Green and
Gerber 2008).
There are also other ways in which the study of voter turnout may be
advanced. In this paper we focus on one particular aspect, namely the underlying
psychological mechanisms. One of the reasons that the explanatory
power of models of voting is still limited, we argue, is the fact that voting,
like other types of behaviour, is inﬂuenced by subtle psychological processes
that have largely been neglected by electoral researchers. In this paper we
2 M. NYHUIS ET AL.
therefore seek to enhance our understanding of such psychological processes
and their effect on electoral participation. More speciﬁcally, we argue that
non-political events and stimuli may increase or decrease the state of activism
in citizens – in other words, create a more active or passive mood – which in
turn affects their tendency to vote. We test these ideas, which are elaborated
in the next sections of this paper, in an experimental study that was conducted
before local elections were held in Germany. We presented participants
with a campaign leaﬂet that included a word puzzle that contained
words that are associated with either action or inaction. The type of words
that were included in the word puzzle had an effect on the strength of
voting intentions that participants reported, even though none of the participants
consciously made the connection between the nature of the stimulus
and the election. We refer to this as subtle priming.
From here the paper proceeds as follows. In the next section we elaborate
on the explanation of electoral turnout with a special emphasis on the underlying
psychological processes. The following section focuses on subtle
priming and discusses research that shows that attitudes and behaviour can
be inﬂuenced outside individuals’ conscious awareness. Next we present
our experimental study and discuss the results. In the ﬁnal section we draw
conclusions about what this experiment tells us about the psychological processes
that inﬂuence voting decisions, discuss the relevance for mobilization
campaigns, and sketch some avenues for future research.
Explaining electoral turnout
Political participation has been central in political science for a long time and
has been focused on in several seminal works (e.g. Barnes and Kaase 1979;
Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). The most popular form of political participation,
and a fundamental one in many theories of democracy, is the act of
voting (Dahl 1989; Lijphart 1997). So it is no surprise that much research
has been conducted on party or candidate choice and voter turnout (for a
review, see Van der Eijk and Franklin 2009). In this paper we focus on the
explanation of the latter and are interested in the factors that inﬂuence citizens’
decision to vote or abstain.
Electoral turnout can be studied in two different ways, namely at the individual
or micro level and at the aggregate or macro level. The ﬁrst approach
focuses on the decision-making by individual citizens and typically addresses
the question why some people vote whereas others abstain, or why people
vote at all (Ferejohn and Fiorina 1974; Blais 2000; Geys 2006). The second
approach focuses on the turnout rates in elections and typically addresses
the question why turnout rates are higher in some countries or in some elections
as compared to others, or why turnout has declined in the past decades
(Franklin 2004). Some studies combine both approaches and look at how
JOURNAL OF ELECTIONS, PUBLIC OPINION AND PARTIES 3
individual-level and system-level characteristics interact with each other
(Anduiza Perea 2002). In this paper we are interested in the individual-level
perspective and focus on factors that inﬂuence citizens’ decision to (not)
vote when an election is coming up.
In a meta-analysis based on 90 articles from 10 different journals in political
science, Smets and van Ham (2013) identiﬁed a large set of variables that have
been put forward as explanatory factors in models of voting. These included
several individual-level variables that they labelled “psychological”, such as
party identiﬁcation, political interest, and satisfaction with democracy.
Whereas these three variables have a clear link with politics, Smets and van
Ham also analysed psychological variables that have nothing to do with politics
as such, like mental health, trust in others, and a hardworking personality.
Although the ﬁrst two did not have a signiﬁcant impact on turnout, the latter
did. This nicely illustrates that electoral behaviour is also inﬂuenced by nonpolitical
factors. One of the reasons that the explanatory power of models
of voting is rather limited is that such factors have been largely neglected
by electoral researchers. We probably have a fairly good idea of the political
factors that inﬂuence the act voting, but our understanding of the more
general psychological processes that have an impact on the decision to
vote or abstain is rather limited.
Previous research has shown that one of the factors that inﬂuence the
chance that citizens cast a ballot is the degree to which they are, more in
general, active or inactive (Noguchi, Handly, and Albarracín 2010). This
means that factors that inﬂuence people’s level of activity will also inﬂuence
their tendency to vote. The level of activity may be conceptualized not only as
a stable personality characteristic, but also as a temporary mood (or as a combination
of both). If we assume that a person’s level of activity is not (only) a
long-term stable characteristic, but may vary from day to day (and also within
a day), and if the general level of activity inﬂuences the tendency to vote, this
leads to interesting expectations about what moves voters and also about the
potential for mobilization campaigns. This is relevant in the light of the fact
that a substantial part of the electorate hesitates about whether to vote or
not and appears to decide last minute (Van der Kolk, Aarts, and Rosema 2007).
In an intriguing laboratory experiment, Noguchi, Handly, and Albarracín
(2010) studied the psychological processes related to individuals’ level of
activity in the context of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Elections by focusing on
a prime that is unrelated to politics. They asked participants to do a task in
which they had to complete 20 word fragments, of which 12 were neutral
and 8 were related either to action concepts (e.g. active, doing, making) or
to inaction concepts (e.g. calm, freeze, pause). They found that participants
in the action condition reported signiﬁcantly stronger political participation
intentions than participants in the inaction condition (the dependent variable
was a measure that combined voting, campaigning, and inﬂuencing others).
4 M. NYHUIS ET AL.
This illustrates that voters may be inﬂuenced by factors that as such have
nothing to do with politics and which they do not associate with the act of
voting. We refer to these as subtle psychological processes.
One might argue that activity is just one more variable to explain voter
turnout. However, we believe that this concept is very valuable to show the
potential of subtle inﬂuence in political participation. In other domains,
such as clinical psychology and psychiatry, the notion of an active mood
has often been used, especially in relation to low mood or depression and
related disorders (e.g. Wilkins et al. 2006). In the emotion literature moods,
as well as emotion episodes, have often been conceived of as a combination
of a pleasant–unpleasant dimension and an arousal–calm dimension (Mayer
et al. 1991). In the political science literature, the notions of active and
passive are presumably most strongly associated with Barber’s (1992) study
of presidential character, in which he analysed personality in terms of positive
versus negative and active versus passive. Whereas his study conceived of the
active–passive dimension as a stable personality characteristic and focused on
political elites, in this paper we focus on temporary moods and the mass level.
The main hypothesis is that being in an active or inactive mood inﬂuences the
decision to vote or abstain and this mood is inﬂuenced by subtle psychological
processes. In the next section we elaborate further on how a person’s
mood may be inﬂuenced through subtle priming.
Subtle priming
Attempts to persuade people are often obvious, because both the attempt
and the aim are clear. Campaign activities funded by the government to
call for citizens to vote are a clear example, as are most of the interventions
studied in the aforementioned get-out-the-vote experiments (Green and
Gerber 2008). However, much persuasion takes place in more subtle ways.
For example, supermarkets inﬂuence consumer behaviour on the basis of
the direction people walk (clockwise or anti-clockwise) and background
music. The fact that subtle mental processes are important in affecting
human behaviour has been shown by studies for more than 100 years on a
wide range of topics (Dijksterhuis, Aarts, and Smith 2005), including voting
behaviour (Bargh 2006). However, despite that it seems obvious that subtle
inﬂuence can also play a role in electoral participation, this has mostly been
neglected in studies of voter turnout.
Numerous experimental studies have demonstrated the power of subtle
processes in many domains on multiple dependent variables, including for
example arousal (Dutton and Aron 1974), attitude formation (Zajonc 1968),
and actual behaviour (North, Hargreaves, and McKendrick 1999, 274). The
primes can consciously be detected by the participant, but they are not consciously
linked to the dependent variable. This feature of subtle processing is
JOURNAL OF ELECTIONS, PUBLIC OPINION AND PARTIES 5
quite different when comparing it with the most invisible form of persuasion:
subliminal inﬂuence. Participants in subliminal conditions are exposed to a
stimulus (prime), such as a word, a photo, or the immediate presentation of
a mask (such as a letter string) before measuring an attitude or behaviour.
However, the stimulus is presented for such a short time that individuals
are not consciously aware that it was presented – usually between 20 and
40 ms (Fennis and Stroebe 2010, 88). While subtle priming is very common
in the social world and well known from advertising, subliminal priming is presumably
less widespread and typically carried out in the laboratory (Lodge
and Taber 2013). However, there are examples of such attempts to inﬂuence
voters (Hassin et al. 2007). The best-known example is the prime in a TV commercial
of the Republican Party in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Elections, in
which the word “RATS” was ﬂashed for some milliseconds near the word
Democrats (Weinberger and Westen 2008).
In this paper we focus solely on subtle priming and neglect subliminal inﬂuence.
Such effects may also occur without a deliberate attempt to inﬂuence
voting behaviour. For example, one study showed that election outcomes
in the United States were affected by how local college football teams performed
shortly before the election: when those teams had just won their
game, the incumbent governor, senator or president received on average
1.6% more votes than when the team had just lost or tied (Healy, Malhotra,
and Mo 2010). Other research showed that the nature of a polling place
(e.g. church or school) can have an effect on the support for speciﬁc candidates
in mayoral elections and the support for speciﬁc policy proposals put
forward in a referendum (Berger, Meredith, and Wheeler 2008; Rutchik
2010). Although much of this type of research has been conducted in the
United States, there is no reason to believe that the effects are limited to
that context. A recent paper by Fatke (2015), for example, reports comparable
effects of the polling location in a referendum and election in Germany.
To increase our insight in the effects of priming on voter turnout, it is
important to conduct further experimental research, to carry out these
studies in different countries and contexts than the United States, use
samples that are more heterogeneous than the popular college student
samples, and design them in ways that reﬂect real life more closely than
lab studies sometimes have done. With these considerations in mind we conducted
an experiment to explore the potential effects of priming with action
and inaction words on voter turnout.
Methods
The aim of this study is to uncover the effects of action words and inaction
words on electoral turnout through subtle priming. So while the action/inaction
words are consciously processed, the participants do not consciously link
6 M. NYHUIS ET AL.
these stimuli with the target variable. In line with the call for more experiments
in other political contexts than the American one (Green and Gerber
2008), we conducted our experimental study in Germany, the largest established
democracy in Europe, and focused on the municipal elections in September
2011. There are two reasons that local elections are particularly
interesting. First, this adds to the desirable heterogeneity of the political contexts
in which electoral research is conducted, because most research is done
around national elections. Second, in national elections the level of turnout
tends to be fairly high which, due to ceiling effects, increases the probability
that the effects of experimental stimuli are relatively small. In local elections in
Germany, on the other hand, the level of electoral turnout is usually close to
50%, which leaves more room for effects of all kinds of variables.
Unlike the study of Noguchi, Handly, and Albarracín (2010), which was
conducted in the lab, we extended the experiment to a more natural
environment. Instead of asking participants to sit behind a computer in a
lab, we asked them to read a printed campaign leaﬂet at their home. To
advance our understanding of political processes, it is important that experiments
are conducted in settings that reﬂect real life as closely as possible
(Barabas and Jerit 2010). Instead of asking participants to complete a set
of letters that could be completed into words associated with action or inaction
(the prime used by Noguchi, Handly, and Albarracín 2010), we primed
participants with similar words by including them in a word puzzle.
Although a word puzzle is not a feature one immediately expects in a campaign
leaﬂet, we believe that this is a more natural way of presenting words
than the task administered in the study with which we make the comparison.
Moreover, the advantage of a word puzzle is that it can be used in
many different contexts for priming all sorts of concepts. Finally, whereas
the experiment by Noguchi, Handly, and Albarracín (2010) focused on introductory
psychology students, our sample is more heterogeneous (see
below).
Hypotheses
We expected that there would be a signiﬁcant difference between participants
who would process action words versus inaction words in terms of
their attitude towards voting and their voting intention. We distinguish
between attitudes and intentions, which is common in social psychology
(Ajzen and Fishbein 1980; Fishbein and Ajzen 2010), because in theory it is
possible that attitudes are affected whereas intentions are not or vice versa
– given the causal chain in attitude–behaviour models the reverse is not
likely, but in theory it is possible.
With respect to the impact of the prime of action versus inaction words, we
formulated the following hypothesis:
JOURNAL OF ELECTIONS, PUBLIC OPINION AND PARTIES 7
H1: Participants who are primed with action words will report a more positive
attitude towards voting in the upcoming election than participants who are
primed with inaction words.
With respect to voting intentions, we base our expectations on ﬁndings in the
previous laboratory experiment and hypothesize that action words can affect
behavioural intentions regarding voting, leading to the following hypothesis:
H2: Participants who are primed with action words will report a stronger intention
to vote in the upcoming election than participants who are primed with
inaction words.
Design and procedure
To test the above hypotheses, we conducted an experiment with a two-group
design to compare the effects of action words and inaction words in a real life
election environment, namely before the German municipal elections in 2011.
Ensuring that participants would see and therefore consciously process all
priming words before measuring the dependent variable, we used two
word puzzles. In these puzzles we included either the action words or inaction
words, depending on the experimental condition. To minimize the likelihood
that participants would consciously link the stimuli with the measurement, we
included each word puzzle in a leaﬂet that gave general information about
the municipal election (the leaﬂet is available in online Appendix C).
At the residence of the participants, the six-step procedure was as follows:
1) Participants were briefed on the research project and asked to participate.
To ensure that the target group would not be informed about the goal of
the research, a cover story was used, that is, that the usability and layout of
new campaign material would be evaluated. Besides, the participants were
told that they had to complete a word puzzle to test its ease of use.
2) Participants were asked to peruse the leaﬂet and to comment on its layout
and usability and brieﬂy discuss a few salient points. Though unimportant
to answer the research question, this was necessary to cover the real prime
and to ensure participants would not link the prime with the measurement
of the dependent variable.
3) Participants had to solve the word puzzle requiring them to use the action
or inaction prime depending on the randomly assigned experimental condition.
The researcher checked that all words were recognized by the participants
and marked on the list beneath the puzzle, while following the
order of the list with the neutral words at the beginning and at the end
of the puzzle.
4) Participants had to complete the survey, which had been pre-tested.
8 M. NYHUIS ET AL.
5) Participants had to recall the words they remembered from the word
puzzle in a free-recall test. Correct words were noted by the researcher
and the number of correct recalls was added to the data while differentiating
between priming words and neutral words.
6) Participants were ﬁnally asked whether they had an idea what the real
intention and design of the experiment was about, for example, what
the relation between the word puzzle and the survey could be. The objective
of this semi-structured conversation between researcher and participant
was to ﬁnd out whether people linked the prime with the
measurement of the dependent variable.
Priming words
Noguchi, Handly, and Albarracín (2010) used the action words go and move
and the inaction words relax and stop in their laboratory experiment. We
also used these four words in our experiment and extended them with
similar action and inaction words to increase the total number to ﬁve: go,
move, jump, join, and run as the “action words” as opposed to relax, stop,
hold, pause, and rest as “inaction words”. Furthermore, four “neutral words”
were added to the puzzle: river, sky, waterfall, and wheel. This was also done
in earlier subliminal and unconscious priming studies where neutral words
were used to cover the stimulus (Bargh et al. 2001; Dijksterhuis, Aarts, and
Smith 2005; Weinberger and Westen 2008; Noguchi, Handly, and Albarracín
2010). Furthermore, because people’s short-term memory storage capacity
in word-tasks is limited to about three to seven items (Smith and Kosslyn
2009), the use of neutral words will increase the chance that participants
will not remember the priming words consciously when measuring the independent
variable. Also, neutral words are useful to cover the positive and
negative primes due to the so-called “serial position effect”. By confronting
the participants with neutral words at the beginning and at the end of the
stimulus, it is more likely that they remember these words instead of items
presented in the middle (Murdock 1962). Therefore, two neutral words were
placed at the beginning and at the end of the puzzles (see online Appendix C).
Dependent variables
Based on earlier studies we not only included the concepts attitude towards
voting and intention to vote in our analysis (cf. Brader 2005; Noguchi,
Handly, and Albarracín 2010), but supplemented these with attitude towards
getting informed about the election and intention to get informed about the
election (Brader 2005) as dependent variables. For the measurement of the
each of the four concepts, we used two items. An example of the
JOURNAL OF ELECTIONS, PUBLIC OPINION AND PARTIES 9
measurement of the attitude towards voting is the item “I consider it important
to vote in the upcoming municipal election”, while an example for the
measurement of intention to vote is “I will go to the polls in the upcoming
municipal election” (see Appendix A for the question wordings). The response
scale included six answer options: strongly disagree, disagree, tend to disagree,
tend to agree, agree, and strongly agree (coded on scale from 0 to
5). We created a scale for each of the four concepts by taking the mean
value of the two items (Cronbach’s α for the resulting scales were as
follows: attitude towards getting informed, α = .80; attitude towards voting,
α = .86; intention to get informed, α = .57; intention to vote, α = .98).
Participants
Because we had decided to conduct the experiment at participants’ home, it
was impractical to spread them across the whole country. For pragmatic
reasons, we recruited participants in the German town Neuenhaus in Lower
Saxony, a small town close to the Dutch border. In terms of demographics
and political proﬁle, this town resembles Germany at large fairly well (see
online Appendix B). To ensure heterogeneity in our sample, the participants
were approached in different areas of the electoral district, on different
days of the week, and at different times of the day, throughout the month
of May 2011. About 1 in 10 agreed to participate. The experiment usually
lasted for about 15 minutes.
A total of 62 people, aged between 16 and 90 (M = 43.7, SD = 17.2) participated
in the study of which 55% was female and 45% was male. Asked in a
questionnaire about their party afﬁliation, 61% reported a party and 39% indicated
that they felt close to none of the political parties; 73% indicated that
they had voted in the previous municipal election, whereas 27% had
abstained.1
The participants were randomly divided into two groups: 31 participants
were primed with action words and 31 participants were primed with
inaction words. We compared the groups in terms of gender (male or female),
age (average in years), partisanship (identiﬁer or non-identiﬁer), and previous
voting behaviour (voted or abstained in the previous municipal election) of
1
In the context of national elections in Germany, the percentage of voters who reported a party afﬁliation
has long been about 70% (see Garzia 2013). The German Longitudinal Election Studies conducted before
and after our own study report comparable levels of partisanship, with the ﬁgure for 2009 being 68%
and the ﬁgure for 2013 being 73%. The actual level of turnout for the municipal elections in Lower
Saxony in 2006 was 52% (source http://www.nls.niedersachsen.de/KW2006/999k.html, consulted on
15 January 2015). Such discrepancies between actual turnout levels and ﬁgures reported in surveys
are well known and the result from a combination of factors (Selb and Munzert 2013). Given that in
this study we do not use survey data to compare voters with non-voters, but instead analyse the
effect of an experimental treatment on voting intention, then the impact of this reporting bias is less
of a problem than in observational studies. However, we do accept that it is possible that those citizens
who are more strongly inclined to abstain are not included in our sample. Thus, we cannot draw any
conclusions about potential mobilization effects among that (relatively small) group.
10 M. NYHUIS ET AL.
the two experimental groups and found no statistically signiﬁcant differences,
so we concluded that the random assignment had been successful.
As indicated above, at the end of the experiment participants were asked
about their ideas of the true purpose of the experiment. None of them
referred in any way to the potential effects of the word puzzle on attitudes
or intentions regarding the election. So, none of the participants seemed to
be aware of the real purpose of the experiment. This substantiates our idea
that if the hypothesized effects are found, these occurred outside the conscious
awareness of participants. This does not mean that the participants
were not aware of the word puzzle or its words as such – it is difﬁcult to
know exactly what is and is not conscious per se (see, e.g. Hassin, Uleman,
and Bargh 2005) – but their responses suggest that participants were
unaware of how these stimuli might have affected their subsequent attitudes
and behaviour in the electoral domain.
Results
The results, which are presented in Table 1, show that participants who were
primed with action words reported, on average, more positive attitudes
towards getting informed about the election and more positive attitudes
towards electoral participation than participants who were primed with inaction
words. They scored about half a point higher on the scale with values
ranging between 0 and 5. For the ﬁrst measure, this effect was statistically signiﬁcant
at the conventional level (p < .05), while the second effect almost was
as well despite the relatively small sample size (p = .06). This means that the
ﬁndings lend support, at least partially, to Hypothesis 1. Priming with action
words versus inaction words in the word puzzle had an effect on the attitudes
that participants reported.
We now shift our attention to behavioural intentions. Are the effects
limited to attitudinal measures, or can similar effects also be observed with
respect to the strength of the intention to vote? The ﬁndings reported in
Table 2 show that participants who were primed with action words indeed
reported stronger behavioural intentions regarding becoming informed
about the election and the act of voting than participants who were primed
Table 1. Effects of the action/inaction prime on attitude towards getting informed about
the election and attitude towards voting (results of t-test).
Action prime
(n = 31)
Inaction prime
(n = 31)
Signiﬁcance
(one tailed)
Attitude towards getting informed M = 3.47 M = 2.79 t = 2.48 (df = 60)
SD = 1.01 SD = 1.14 p = .008
Attitude towards voting M = 4.16 M = 3.68 t = 1.58 (df = 60)
SD = 0.98 SD = 1.40 p = .060
Note: M = mean; SD = standard deviation; df = degrees of freedom; p = signiﬁcance level.
JOURNAL OF ELECTIONS, PUBLIC OPINION AND PARTIES 11
with inaction words. Again, participants in the action condition scored about
half a point higher on the scale and both effects were signiﬁcant at the conventional
level of statistical signiﬁcance (p < .05). This lends support to
Hypothesis 2. The primes that were presented by using different words in
the word puzzle resulted in differences in the intentions reported by the participants
in the experiment.
The t-test that we used assumes a normal distribution and homogeneity of
variance of the variables. For three of the four variables, these conditions were
not fully met (which is understandable because of potential ceiling effects).
Therefore, we also analysed the differences between both experimental
groups with a t-test that does not assume equal variance and with a non-parametric
test, the Mann–Whitney U-test, which focuses on the median instead of
the mean (Moore and McCabe 2008). In all instances, the coefﬁcients of the ttest
were identical and the results of the Mann–Whitney U-test were also
similar: the level of statistical signiﬁcance was virtually identical to the
values reported for the t-test in the current tables (p < .05, except p < .10 for
attitude towards voting). So the ﬁndings appear to have not been affected
by a violation of those underlying assumptions.
It is possible that the answers by participants to the items about voting
have been inﬂuenced by social desirability, which is one of the reasons that
electoral turnout tends to be relatively high among survey respondents
when compared to election statistics (Holbrook and Krosnick 2010).
However, in as far as responses have been inﬂuenced by such tendencies,
one would expect this to happen in both experimental conditions and
hence this should not affect the differences that we observe between both
experimental groups.
So, the results of the experiment show that subtle inﬂuence on voting
intentions indeed occurs when participants consciously process information
(words in the puzzle) that they do not associate with voting. This study thus
provides evidence that subtle priming works with respect to electoral behaviour.
When primed with words that are associated with action (e.g. move,
jump, run) instead of words that are associated with inaction (stop, pause,
relax), participants reported a stronger desire to become informed about
the election and a stronger intention to vote. This happened outside the
Table 2. Effects of the action/inaction prime on intention to get informed about the
election and intention to vote (results of t-test).
Action prime (n = 31) Inaction prime (n = 31) Signiﬁcance (one tailed)
Intention to get informed M = 2.81 M = 2.29 t = 1.73 (df = 60)
SD = 1.05 SD = 1.30 p = .045
Intention to vote M = 4.23 M = 3.45 t = 2.30 (df = 60)
SD = 1.01 SD = 1.58 p = .013
Note: M = mean; SD = standard deviation; df = degrees of freedom; p = signiﬁcance level.
12 M. NYHUIS ET AL.
awareness of participants, because none of them realized that the word
puzzle was used as priming stimulus. These ﬁndings support the results of
Noguchi, Handly, and Albarracín (2010), who reported a similar effect of the
priming of action words on three aspects of political participation in a lab
experiment in the United States; while their study reported effects of about
one point on a scale from 1 to 10, in our study, the effects are about half a
point on a scale from 0 to 5. This means that in neither study the prime converted
likely abstainers into likely voters, which would of course have been
very odd, but given the subtleness of the primes we consider the size of
the effect still remarkable.
Conclusion
In this paper we have analysed the effect of subtle psychological processes on
voter turnout by means of an experiment, which was conducted in Germany
before local elections were held. We presented participants a campaign leaﬂet
that included information about the upcoming election as well as a word
puzzle, which they were asked to complete. We have shown that if citizens
were primed through the word puzzle with words that are associated with
action (e.g. run, move) they reported stronger intentions to vote in the upcoming
election than if they were primed with words that are associated with inaction
(e.g. pause, relax), even though none of the participants consciously
associated the prime with the effect on turnout. These ﬁndings lend
support to the theoretical idea that the decision to vote or abstain is inﬂuenced
by the degree to which citizens are in an active or passive mood.
This mood can be inﬂuenced through subtle priming, so by presenting
stimuli that people do not consciously associate with the act of voting.
The ﬁndings of our study are comparable to those of a lab experiment in
the United States, which focused on the presidential elections (Noguchi,
Handly, and Albarracín 2010). To make the experiment less artiﬁcial, we conducted
the study at the participants’ home instead of in the lab. In such a
more natural setting, the behaviour of participants is more likely to be
similar to their normal behaviour, which is exactly the reason that ﬁeld experiments
are often preferred above lab experiments (Gerber and Green 2008).
Furthermore, our sample was more heterogeneous than the sample of psychology
students in the study by Noguchi, Handly, and Albarracín (2010).
The fact that the effect sizes in our experiment are fairly similar to the
effects found by Noguchi, Handly, and Albarracín (2010) despite the many
differences between both studies boosts our conﬁdence in the robustness
of the effects of action/inaction words. However, this does not mean that in
our experiment, there are no methodological issues or concerns. One of the
main questions is how long effects like those observed in our study last,
and if they also lead to higher actual turnout levels among the participants
JOURNAL OF ELECTIONS, PUBLIC OPINION AND PARTIES 13
who were primed with action words. In our study we were not able to observe
this and hence future research will have to show to what extent this happens.
We also acknowledge that in other contexts the effect may differ. More
speciﬁcally, we expect that in elections where the level of turnout is much
higher, smaller or no effects may be observed.
An important question that arises is what these ﬁndings tell us about
reality. After all, not many citizens will complete a word puzzle with action
or inaction words shortly before the election. However, we conducted this
study not because we are interested in action words as such, but because
they are a means to assess the relevance of subtle psychological processes
more in general, and the notion of an active mood in particular, for electoral
turnout. The main relevance of the experiment is that it shows that the
decision to vote or abstain is inﬂuenced by psychological processes that
concern factors that have nothing to do with politics; a person’s mood
(active/passive) is one of them. Surely, many voters are strongly committed
to voting whereas others are ﬁrm in their decision to abstain. For such
voters, there is not much room for the inﬂuence of such subtle psychological
processes. However, many voters are in-between and whether they vote or
abstain may depend on what happens in their life and this may have
nothing to do with politics. If a weak stimulus like action words or inaction
words in a puzzle can already have an effect, one can only imagine how
strong the effect would be of events that are much more signiﬁcant to the
individual. Events that make people feel more depressed will probably
lower the chance that they vote, while events that make people feel energetic
will increase their tendency to vote. This is the type of process that our experiment
illuminates.
The concept of action/inaction can help to interpret ﬁndings from previous
research about voter turnout. For example, some studies have shown that
there is a relationship between weather conditions and level of turnout
(Gomez, Hansford, and Krause 2007; Eisinga, Te Grotenhuis, and Pelzer
2012). There are several mechanisms that one may come up with that contribute
to this correlation. One could be that rain depresses turnout while sunshine
stimulates turnout because the weather inﬂuences the mood that
people are in, which in turn affects turnout. In previous studies, the negative
effect of rain on turnout was interpreted in terms of theories about the costs
and beneﬁts of voting, but this is not the only possible mechanism.
The ﬁndings of our experiments lead to several questions that can guide
future research. We would like to emphasize a couple of questions that we
hope future research will focus on. First, in our experiments, the stimuli
were very weak. It would be interesting to replicate this type of experiment
with much stronger stimuli and examine what happens if citizens’ mood
becomes much more active or much less so. We do not want to encourage
colleagues to bring participants of their studies into a state of deep depression
14 M. NYHUIS ET AL.
(or euphoria, for that matter), but a small step in that direction would be
welcome. Second, it is worth examining how long such effects last and if
they transfer to actual behaviour. In our studies we focused on voting intentions,
but future research may expand the dependent variables and also
examine actual turnout. To fully explore this matter, we also need to have
more insight in the moment that voters make their decision to vote or
abstain. Furthermore, an interesting question is how such insights can be
used in campaigns aimed at electoral mobilization. We are not saying that
campaigns should forget about political factors from previous get-out-thevote
activities, but it may be a good idea to supplement such campaign
actions with innovative initiatives that build on insights about the impact of
subtle psychological processes. Finally, apart from the notion of an active
mood, there may be other concepts that are useful for understanding how
psychological processes that have nothing to do with politics may inﬂuence
voter turnout. This area has not yet been deeply explored and therefore fascinating
and useful insights can still be gained.
Acknowledgements
The authors contributed to this paper in the following ways. Research design: M.N. and
J.G.; development of stimulus material: M.N.; data collection: M.N.; data analysis: M.N.
and M.R.; paper writing: M.N., M.R., and J.G. The authors received no grants or other
special funding for this research. We would like to express our gratitude to all colleagues
who commented upon an earlier version of this paper at academic conferences,
in particular Michael Lewis-Beck, as well as three anonymous reviewers from
this journal and editor Rachel Gibson, for their valuable feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Martin Nyhuis works as a Parliamentary Assistant at the European Parliament. He conducted
the research during his studies at the University of Twente. He holds a Master of
Science in Communications and specialized in subconscious persuasion and inﬂuence.
Jordy F. Gosselt is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Science
at the University of Twente. His research interests include the validity and reliability of
methods of communication research (such as mystery shop research, experimental
research, content analysis, mystery calls and questionnaires).
Martin Rosema is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Twente.
His main research interests are voting behaviour, political psychology and referendums.
He has published on topics such as partisanship, electoral turnout, political representation
and voting advice applications.
JOURNAL OF ELECTIONS, PUBLIC OPINION AND PARTIES 15
ORCID
Martin Nyhuis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9905-7861
Jordy F. Gosselt http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9270-0252
Martin Rosema http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0636-6380
References
Ajzen, I., and M. Fishbein. 1980. Understanding Attitudes and Predicting Social Behavior.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Anduiza Perea, E. 2002. “Individual Characteristics, Institutional Incentives and Electoral
Abstention in Western Europe.” European Journal of Political Research 41: 643–673.
Barabas, J., and J. Jerit. 2010. “Are Survey Experiments Externally Valid?” American
Political Science Review 104: 226–242.
Barber, J. D. 1992. The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Bargh, J. A. 2006. “What have we been Priming all These Years? On the Development,
Mechanisms, and Ecology of Unconscious Social Behaviour.” European Journal of
Social Psychology 36: 147–168.
Bargh, J. A., M. Chen, and L. Burrows. 1996. “Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct
Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action.” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 71: 230–244.
Bargh, J. A., P. M. Gollwitzer, A. Lee-Chai, K. Barndollar, and R. Trötschel. 2001. “The
Automatic Will: Nonconscious Activation and Pursuit of Behavioral Goals.” Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 81: 1014–1027.
Bargh, J. A., and P. Pietromonaco. 1982. “Automatic Information Processing and Social
Perception: The Inﬂuence of Trait Information Presented Outside of Conscious
Awareness on Impression Formation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
43: 437–449.
Barnes, S. H., and M. Kaase. 1979. Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western
Democracies. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Berger, J., M. Meredith, and S. C. Wheeler. 2008. “Contextual Priming: Where People
Vote Affects How they Vote.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105:
8846–8849.
Blais, A. 2000. To Vote or Not to Vote: The Merits and Limits of Rational Choice Theory.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Brader, T. 2005. “Striking A Responsive Chord: How Political ads Motivate and Persuade
Voters by Appealing to Emotions.” American Journal of Political Science 49: 388–405.
Burdein, I., M. Lodge, and C. Taber. 2006. “Experiments on the Automaticity of Political
Beliefs and Attitudes.” Political Psychology 27: 359–371.
Dahl, R. A. 1989. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Dijksterhuis, A., H. Aarts, and P. K. Smith. 2005. “The Power of the Subliminal: On
Subliminal Persuasion and Other Potential Applications.” In The New Unconscious,
edited by R. R. Hassin, J. S. Uleman, and J. A. Bargh, 77–106. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Dutton, D. G., and A. P. Aron. 1974. “Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction
Under Conditions of High Anxiety.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30:
510–517.
16 M. NYHUIS ET AL.
Eisinga, R., M. Te Grotenhuis, and B. Pelzer. 2012. “Weather Conditions and Voter
Turnout in Dutch National Parliament Elections, 1971–2010.” International Journal
of Biometeorology 56: 783–786.
Fatke, M. 2015. “Behavioural Primes in the Voting Booth: Further Evidence of Priming
Effects in Popular Votes and Elections.” Electoral Studies 40: 315–321.
Fennis, B., and W. Stroebe. 2010. The Psychology of Advertising. New York: Psychology
Press Taylor & Francis Group.
Ferejohn, J. A., and M. P. Fiorina. 1974. “The Paradox of not Voting: A Decision Theoretic
Analysis.” American Political Science Review 68: 525–536.
Fieldhouse, E., D. Cutts, P. Widdop, and P. John. 2013. “Do Impersonal Mobilisation
Methods Work? Evidence from a Nationwide Get-Out-the-Vote Experiment in
England.” Electoral Studies 32: 113–123.
Fishbein, M., and I Ajzen. 2010. Predicting and Changing Behavior: The Reasoned Action
Approach. New York: Psychology Press.
Franklin, M. 2004. Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established
Democracies Since 1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garzia, D. 2013. “Changing Parties, Changing Partisans: The Personalization of Partisan
Attachments in Western Europe.” Political Psychology 34: 67–89.
Gerber, A. S., and D. P. Green. 2000. “The Effects of Canvassing, Direct Mail, and
Telephone Contact on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment.” American Political
Science Review 94: 653–663.
Gerber, A. S., and D. P. Green. 2001. “Do Phone Calls Increase Voter Turnout? A Field
Experiment.” Public Opinion Quarterly 65: 75–85.
Gerber, A. S., and D. P. Green. 2008. “Field Experiments and Natural Experiments.” In
Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology, edited by J. M. Box-Steffensmeier, H. E.
Brady, and D. Collier, 357–381. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gerber, A. S., D. P. Green, and D. W. Nickerson. 2003. “Getting out the Vote in Local
Elections: Results from Six Door-to-Door Canvassing Experiments.” Journal of
Politics 65: 1083–1096.
Geys, B. 2006. “‘Rational’ Theories of Voter Turnout: A Review.” Political Studies Review 4:
16–35.
Gomez, B. T., T. G. Hansford, and G. A. Krause. 2007. “The Republicans Should Pray for
Rain: Weather, Turnout, and Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections.” Journal of Politics
69: 649–663.
Green, D. P., and A. S. Gerber. 2008. Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout. 2nd
ed. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Green, D. P., M. C. McGrath, and P. M. Aronow. 2013. “Field Experiments and the Study
of Voter Turnout.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties 23: 27–48.
Harder, J., and J. A. Krosnick. 2008. “Why do People Vote? A Psychological Analysis of
the Causes of Voter Turnout.” Journal of Social Issues 64: 525–549.
Hassin, R. R., M. J. Ferguson, D. Shidlovski, and T. Gross. 2007. “Subliminal Exposure to
National Flags Affects Political Thought and Behavior.” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Science of the United States of America 104 (50): 19757–19761.
Hassin, R. R., J. S. Uleman, and J. A. Bargh, eds. 2005. The New Unconscious. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Healy, A. J., N. Malhotra, and C. H. Mo. 2010. “Irrelevant Events Affect Voters’ Evaluations
of Government Performance.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107:
12804–12809.
Holbrook, A. L., and J. A. Krosnick. 2010. “Social Desirability Bias in Voter Turnout
Reports: Tests Using the Item Count Technique.” Public Opinion Quarterly 74: 37–67.
JOURNAL OF ELECTIONS, PUBLIC OPINION AND PARTIES 17
John, P., and T. Brennan. 2008. “How Different are Telephoning and Canvassing?
Results From a ‘Get Out the Vote’ Field Experiment in the British 2005 General
Election.” British Journal of Political Science 38: 565–574.
Karp, J. A., and S. A. Banducci. 2007. “Party Mobilization and Political Participation in
New and Old Democracies.” Party Politics 13: 217–234.
Karp, J. A., S. A. Banducci, and S. Bowler. 2007. “Getting out the Vote: Party Mobilization
in a Comparative Perspective.” British Journal of Political Science 38: 91–112.
Karremans, J. C., W. Stroebe, and J. Claus. 2006. “Beyond Vicary’s Fantasies: The Impact
of Subliminal Priming and Brand Choice.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
42: 792–798.
Lijphart, A. 1997. “Unequal Participation: Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma.” American
Political Science Review 91: 1–14.
Lodge, M., and C. S. Taber. 2013. The Rationalizing Voter. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Mayer, J. D., P. Salovey, S. Gomberg-Kaufman, and K. Blainey. 1991. “A Broader
Conception of Mood Experience.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60:
100–111.
Moore, D. S., and G. P. McCabe. 2008. Statistiek in de praktijk. Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers.
Murdock, Jr., B. B. (1962). The Serial Position Effect of Free Recall. Journal of Experimental
Psychology, 64, 482–488.
Nickerson, D. W. 2008. “Is Voting Contagious? Evidence from Two Field Experiments.”
American Political Science Review 102: 49–57.
Noguchi, K., I. Handly, and D. Albarracín. 2010. “Participating in Politics Resembles
Physical Activity: General Action Patterns in International Archives, United States
Archives, and Experiments.” Psychological Science 22: 235–242.
North, A. C., D. J. Hargreaves, and J. McKendrick. 1999. “The Inﬂuence of in-Store Music
on Wine Selection.” Journal of Applied Psychology 84: 271–276.
Rutchik, A. M. 2010. “Deus ex Machina: The Inﬂuence of Polling Place on Voting
Behavior.” Political Psychology 31: 209–225.
Selb, P., and S. Munzert. 2013. “Voter Overrepresentation, Vote Misreporting, and
Turnout Bias in Postelection Surveys.” Electoral Studies 32: 186–196.
Smets, K., and C. van Ham. 2013. “The Embarrassment of Riches? A Meta-Analysis of
Individual-Level Research on Voter Turnout.” Electoral Studies 32: 344–359.
Smith, E. E., and S. M. Kosslyn. 2009. Cognitive Psychology. London: Pearson Education
Limited.
Strahan, E. J., S. J. Spencer, and M. P. Zanna. 2002. “Subliminal Priming and Persuasion:
Striking While the Iron is Hot.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 38: 556–568.
Van der Eijk, C., and M. N. Franklin. 2009. Elections and Voters. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Van der Kolk, H., K. Aarts, and M. Rosema. 2007. “Twijfelen en kiezen.” In Een verdeeld
electoraat: De Tweede Kamerverkiezingen van 2006, edited by K. Aarts, H. van der Kolk,
and M. Rosema, 211–234. Utrecht: Spectrum.
Verba, S., K. L. Schlozman, and H. E. Brady. 1995. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in
American Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Weinberger, J., and D. Westen. 2008. “Rats, we should have Used Clinton: Subliminal
Priming in Political Campaigns.” Political Psychology 29: 631–651.
Wheeler, S. C., and J. Berger. 2007. “When the Same Prime Leads to Different Effects.”
Journal of Consumer Research 34: 357–368.
Wheeler, S. C., and K. G. DeMarree. 2009. “Multiple Mechanisms of Prime-to-Behavior
Effects.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 3: 566–581.
18 M. NYHUIS ET AL.
Wilkins, C. H., Y. I. Sheline, C. M. Roe, S. J. Birge, and J. C. Morris. 2006. “Vitamin D
Deﬁciency is Associated with Low Mood and Worse Cognitive Performance in
Older Adults.” American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry 14: 1032–1040.
Zajonc, R. B. 1968. “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure.” Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 9: 1–27.
Appendix A: Question wordings
The survey items that were included in the questionnaire that participants
completed at the end of the experiment are listed in Table A1.
Table A1. Survey questions used to measure attitudes and behavioural intentions.
Attitude towards getting informed Attitude towards voting
I think it is important to collect more information about
the municipal election
I consider it important to vote in the
upcoming municipal election
I am interested in getting more information about the
upcoming municipal election
I believe it is good to go to the polls in the
next election
Intention to get informed Intention to vote
I will search for more information about the upcoming
municipal election
I will go to the polls in the upcoming
municipal election
I will collect additional information about the upcoming
municipal election
I will vote in the upcoming municipal election
JOURNAL OF ELECTIONS, PUBLIC OPINION AND PARTIES 19