We sent three text-messages before the Chilean presidential election of November 19, 2017, and three more messages before the runoff of December 19th. The messages attempted to encourage youngsters to vote, by either providing them relevant information or by appealing to their desire of being represented in government. More specifically, we sent the following messages:
Text Message 1
Hi [NAME]! In the last election, just X% of the young people in your municipality voted. Find out where you vote here: [link]
Here, the idea was to see whether the information of turnout rates in the past election could affect the decision to vote. It is worth noting that in Chilean municipal election of 2016 (the "last election" alluded in the message), turnout rates among the youth were very low. In this sense, we thought that the less youngsters voted in the past, more compelled they would feel to vote in the next election.
Text Message 2
Hi [NAME]! If the young people don’t vote, others are going to choose instead! Participate in the elections this Sunday.
In this message, we wanted to appeal to their desire of being represent in government decision-making, by participating in the election.
Text Message 3
Hi [NAME]! Today is election day! At what time do you go vote?
In this third message, the idea was to prime voters to think about when they vote, and therefore, plan the day accordingly.
For the runoff of December 19, we sent the same messages, but to half of the treated units, in order to see whether there is an effect of receiving messages for both elections and to analyze if the messages of the first-round had a durable effect towards the runoff.
As an additional exercise, we implemented a survey-experiment as follows. In an ex-post survey (after the runoff) we randomized the way of asking voters wether they actually voted, along the lines of Della Vigna et al (2017). Essentially, we reduced costs of lying to one group, by telling them that the survey was going to be much shorter if they did not vote. We aim to compare their self-reported answers with the actual administrative data on turnout, which will provide us a measure of how much voters lie (if they do) about their electoral participation.