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David Lazer
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« Save the date: Political Networks Conference @ Harvard, June 11-13 | Main | Motion Sensors in Laboratories »

14 September 2008

Obama's Neighbor to Neighbor tool

I have written before about the network-based foundation of Obama's campaign. Another piece of the network strategy has just emerged, in an e-mail that just went out on Obama's list regarding a new tool, called "Neighbor to Neighbor." See excerpt:

It's up to each of us to talk to voters across the country and make sure they know what this election is really about.

We have an exciting new tool called Neighbor to Neighbor that makes it easy to talk to potential supporters about Barack and the issues that matter.

Help get the conversation back on track today by making phone calls.

Nothing is more powerful than having undecided voters hear from ordinary people. And right now, that's needed more than ever.

No prior experience is required. Neighbor to Neighbor gives you a list of potential supporters, suggested topics to talk about, and an easy way to report back on who you've contacted.

With less than eight weeks until Election Day, we can't allow voters to lose focus on the big issues and get swept up by the smears and lies coming out of the McCain campaign.

Reach out to fellow voters now and grow this movement for change:

http://my.barackobama.com/n2n

This is based on a pretty strong theoretical understanding of how networks mobilize action; e.g., this is consistent with field experiments on how to increase turnout. I am not familiar with similar field experiments on how these methods affect preference (as compared to turnout). Any cites along these lines would be welcome as comments. (One wonders if campaigns conduct experiments along these lines prior to the election; this would certainly be doable, and a drop in the bucket given overall expenditures.)

This is, in any case, a striking departure from the "mobilize the base" strategies of recent years, where the objective was to get partisans to talk to each other, not partisans to undecideds. And arguably, given the apparent value of intersecting with people with different views, good for our democracy (e.g., see Diana Mutz's recent book).

I would be interested if there have been any surveys with an item like: "Have you spoken to anyone about the election, and what were their candidate preferences?" Does one see a difference in persuasion attempts by Obama as compared to McCain supporters? Are these persuasion attempts targeted at undecideds?

Posted by David Lazer at September 14, 2008 9:27 PM