When Parties Knock: Mobilization, Persuasion, and Vote Choice Across Democracies

This paper analyzes how parties succeed in increasing their electoral support through their own contacting means. Previous scholarship has found that personal contacting leads to higher levels of turnout or favorable votes (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1992; Wielhouwer and Lockerbie 1994; Gerber and Green 1999; Niven 2004; Pattie and Johnston 2015; Schmitt-Beck 2016; Yi 2023). However, these studies have tested this relationship in specific local areas or single countries. Our study advances this line of research by: 1) explaining how parties attain this goal by analyzing both the target group of citizens, and the means of contacting (face-to-face or digital), and 2) enhancing the external validity by employing the CSES dataset, which includes multiple democracies. We find that parties effectively enhance mobilization when targeting their supporters through face-to-face contacting. However, once these constituencies decide to vote, both types of contacting – face-to-face and digital – are helpful to make them vote for their preferred party. In sum, party contacting catalyzes parties’ electoral success not only by mobilizing their supporters, but also by influencing their vote.