New Experiments in Minority Voter Mobilization: Second in a Series of Reports on the California Votes Initiative

During the first phase of the California Votes Initiative, spanning elections from June 2006 to March 2007, participating community-based organizations personally contacted over 82,000 low-propensity voters, through strategies such as door-to-door outreach and phone calls, plus reached an additional 100,000 voters through less direct methods, such as voter forums and messages to congregations. This outreach inspired many to participate in the electoral process for the first time. The initiative evaluation team worked with the community organizations to imbed field experiments into their outreach efforts, comparing turnout among those targeted for contact and those assigned to control groups. This resulted in strong empirical support for a series of best practices that were detailed in a September 2007 report.1 A second phase of the initiative has continued this path-breaking research with further field experiments in the February and June 2008 elections, with more planned for November 2008. This report briefly reviews the results from the first phase of the initiative, adds findings from February 2008 and June 2008 as available,2 and outlines the follow-up studies planned for November 2008. Many findings from the first phase were confirmed, and the two rounds of experiments conducted so far this year provide valuable refinements to the list of best practices established in that earlier report. 1 Michelson, Melissa R., Lisa Garcia Bedolla and Donald P. Green. 2007. "New Experiments in Minority Voter Mobilization: A Report on the California Votes Initiative" (San Francisco, CA: The James Irvine Foundation). Available at www.irvine.org. 2 In many counties, particularly large ones such as Los Angeles, voting information is not released until several months after an election

New Experiments in Minority Voter Mobilization: A Report on the California Votes Initiative

Evaluates the effectiveness of efforts in California to mobilize voters in communities with significant low-income and minority populations

New Experiments in Minority Voter Mobilization: Third and Final Report on the California Votes Initiative

This report offers new insights about voter mobilization strategies used in our California Votes Initiative. Launched in 2006, the initiative supported nine nonprofit organizations as they reached out to infrequent voters in low-income and ethnic communities in the San Joaquin Valley and parts of Southern California. This publication, the third and final report on the initiative, summarizes findings from the entirety of the project's experiments. It examines the long-term effects of voter mobilization and the effects of specific approaches, such as canvassing and phone calls, on voter attitudes toward politics and political engagement. Qualitative analyses explore the components of a successful get-out-the-vote campaign and identify five practices organizations of many types may use to increase turnout

The Political Consequences of Racialized Ethnic Identities

Racial classifications are a social construct with no basis in biology; yet, race is an omnipresent and powerful factor in U.S. politics, shaping electoral boundaries, disbursement of resources, and political alliances (Omi and Winant 1994, Haney López 1994). Race, then, is a malleable construct wielded by varying interests, with racial definitions changing in response to social and political battles. Some new immigrant groups initially classified as not white have been reclassified as white over time, thereby benefitting from associated legal, economic, and sociopolitical privileges. More recently, however, some Latinos have sought recognition as a distinct non-white racial group, in acknowledgment of the racialization of their identities over time. We seek to better understand who is most likely to support a racialized Latino identity, and the political consequences of this choice. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey, we test whether individuals who believe that a Latino identity is a racial identity are also more likely to be interested in and engaged in politics. We also examine the extent to which support for a racialized Latino identity is associated with progressive attitudes on racial issues. © The Author(s) 2023

Text Messages as Mobilization Tools: The Conditional Effect of Habitual Voting and Election Salience

Dale and Strauss’s (DS) noticeable reminder theory (NRT) of voter mobilization posits that mobilization efforts that are highly noticeable and salient to potential voters, even if impersonal, can be successful. In an innovative experimental design, DS show that text messages substantially boost turnout, challenging previous claims that social connectedness is the key to increasing participation. We replicate DS’s research design and extend it in two key ways. First, whereas the treatment in DS’s experiment was a “warm” text message combined with contact, we test NRT more cleanly by examining the effect of “cold” text messages that are completely devoid of auxiliary interaction. Second, we test an implication of NRT that habitual voters should exhibit the largest treatment effects in lower salience elections whereas casual voters should exhibit the largest treatment effects in higher salience elections. Via these two extensions, we find support for NRT

Latinos now trust politicians even less than before, but have become more politically active

Over the past two decades, Latinos in America have gone from being told that they did not belong in 2006, that they held the electoral balance of power in 2012, and finally back to rejection again with the election of President Trump in 2016. In new research, Melissa R. Michelson and Jessica L. Lavariega Monforti examine the effects of these changing societal messages and sometimes outright racism on Latinos’ cynicism about, and participation in, politics. They find that, compared to 2012, Latinos are now more likely to be interested and participate in politics, at the same time as having far less trust in government

Optimal strategies for gravitational wave stochastic background searches in pulsar timing data

A low frequency stochastic background of gravitational waves may be detected by pulsar timing experiments in the next five to ten years. Using methods developed to analyze interferometric gravitational wave data, in this paper we lay out the optimal techniques to detect a background of gravitational waves using a pulsar timing array. We show that for pulsar distances and gravitational wave frequencies typical of pulsar timing experiments, neglecting the effect of the metric perturbation at the pulsar does not result in a significant deviation from optimality. We discuss methods for setting upper limits using the optimal statistic, show how to construct skymaps using the pulsar timing array, and consider several issues associated with realistic analysis of pulsar timing data.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures. Added figure with sky sensitivity for Parkes Pulsar Timing Array, included dipole overlap reduction function and derivation in appendix, extended likelihood discussio

Fermi Large Area Telescope Constraints on the Gamma-ray Opacity of the Universe

The Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) includes photons with wavelengths from ultraviolet to infrared, which are effective at attenuating gamma rays with energy above ~10 GeV during propagation from sources at cosmological distances. This results in a redshift- and energy-dependent attenuation of the gamma-ray flux of extragalactic sources such as blazars and Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). The Large Area Telescope onboard Fermi detects a sample of gamma-ray blazars with redshift up to z~3, and GRBs with redshift up to z~4.3. Using photons above 10 GeV collected by Fermi over more than one year of observations for these sources, we investigate the effect of gamma-ray flux attenuation by the EBL. We place upper limits on the gamma-ray opacity of the Universe at various energies and redshifts, and compare this with predictions from well-known EBL models. We find that an EBL intensity in the optical-ultraviolet wavelengths as great as predicted by the "baseline" model of Stecker et al. (2006) can be ruled out with high confidence.Comment: 42 pages, 12 figures, accepted version (24 Aug.2010) for publication in ApJ; Contact authors: A. Bouvier, A. Chen, S. Raino, S. Razzaque, A. Reimer, L.C. Reye