Does facetime with political candidates increase voter support and participation? The answer seems to be no, according to a field experiment during the 2014 Italian municipal elections conducted by Enrico Cantoni at MIT and Vincent Pons at Harvard Business School. They found that door-to-door visits made by city council candidates during the five weeks before the election did not have any significant effect on electoral participation. However, when volunteer canvassers supporting the candidates’ party lists visited voters, it increased turnout by 1.8 percentage points, amounting to a persuasion rate of 19.8%. Because volunteers were openly supporting the party but not any candidate in particular, the researchers infer that the difference was driven in part by candidates devoting less time and effort to reaching nonvoters, and more time and effort to winning over already active voters
Source: Do Interactions With Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy
