Door-to-door canvassing in the European elections: Evidence from a Swedish field experiment

In this paper I report the results from a door-to-door canvassing experiment conducted in Sweden during the 2014 European elections. The canvassing was performed by members of the Social Democratic Party and the experiment closely resembles the partisan nature of most mobilizing campaigns in Europe. The paper is one of the first to provide causal evidence for the mobilizing effectiveness of canvassing outside the United States. Living in a household that was visited by canvassers increases the probability of voting by 3.6 percentage points. This effect is entirely driven by estimates twice as large for occasional and first-time voters. Compared to previous research, the high compliance rate gives precisely estimated effects that are closer to average treatment effects.