Could this US import improve voter turnout?

As Mark Ferguson wrote here last week, just doing “ok” isn’t good enough anymore. Labour needs to get serious about winning.

One of the key ways this seriousness should manifest itself is a willingness to try new ideas. As well as encouraging innovation from within the party, that means bringing in talent and ideas from outside the party to challenge the status quo. The appointments of Arnie Graf and Matthew McGregor show that we’re on the right track, but there’s another US import that Labour would be wise to consider.

Over recent years, there’s been a quiet revolution in progressive political campaigning in the US, a revolution that goes far deeper than the much-heralded shift from traditional to digital media. Progressive causes have increasingly been using new insights into human behaviour to shape their tactics and change the way they interact with the public.

These insights have been informed largely by a group of academics who became frustrated by the musty world of out-of-touch political science and psychology, and who decided instead to look at real-world applications that could actually help Democrats win elections.

Since 2007 this work has been run primarily through the Analyst Institute, a DC-based organization that has advised numerous progressive groups – including both Obama campaigns. However, unlike many of the other firms associated with Obama’s victories, the AI does this very quietly. It has practically nothing on its website and rarely briefs journalists (Sacha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab, is a notable exception).

And yet it has a lot to shout about. The AI has run hundreds of experiments, and collated the results of dozens more. It has built a body of knowledge that offers powerful insights into how voters’ behaviour can be influenced by political campaigns, insights that have proven particularly useful when it comes to turning out the Democrat vote – a major factor in Obama’s success and one that is likely to be crucial for Labour too, as recent research from the Fabian Society has shown.

One experiment in Pennsylvania in 2008 found that when canvassers talked voters through a ‘voting plan’ – for example asking them when they’ll vote, how they’ll get to the polling station, and where they’ll be coming from – turnout increased by over 4% overall, twice the increase of the next best mobilisation script. Interestingly, however, this effect was only found in households with just one eligible voter, with no impact at all on households with multiple voters.

Another technique – one that will be familiar to anyone who contributed to Obama’s GOTV efforts last year – is a simple change in the language used when contacting potential voters. Experiments have shown that using phrases that include the noun ‘voter’ rather than the verb ‘vote’ (so for example saying “How important is it for you to be a voter in the next election?” rather than “How likely are you to vote in the next election?”) resulted in a significantly higher turnout.

Of course, there is nothing to say that the same techniques will work over here – one of the major challenges of behavioural science is translating overarching principles of human behaviour to specific local contexts. But there’s nothing to stop us from running our own experiments to see what works in the UK, and the local and European elections in 2014 give us the perfect opportunity to do just that. That would give us plenty of time to put the findings into practice in 2015.

One of the significant merits of this US import, unlike many of the others, is that it’s relatively cheap. This isn’t about doing new stuff, or installing lots of new technology, it’s just about changing the way we do some of the things we’re already doing. All that is needed in terms of resources is a smart academic to design the experiments and crunch the numbers once the results are in.

The trickier bits are the implementation and collection of results. For that, we will have to rely on local campaign staff and volunteers, and they will need to be convinced of the merits of trialling these new approaches. While this will require some effort from HQ, I’m convinced the pay-off will be worthwhile.

As the current Prime Minister struts his stuff with Obama in White House today, the Prime Minister-in-waiting should be back at home looking at how Labour can use more of the tactics that helped the President get elected to the White House in the first place.