TY  - JOUR
AU  - Gerber,Alan
AU  - Kessler,Daniel
AU  - Meredith,Marc
TI  - The Persuasive Effects of Direct Mail:  A Regression Discontinuity Approach
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14206
PY  - 2008
Y2  - July 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14206
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14206.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alan S. Gerber
Yale University
Institution for Social and Policy Studies
77 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06520
Tel: 203/432-5232
E-Mail: alan.gerber@yale.edu

Daniel Kessler
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
434 Galvez Mall
Stanford, CA  94305
Tel: 650/723-0596
E-Mail: fkessler@stanford.edu

Marc Meredith
Department of Political Science
University of Pennsylvania
208 S. 37th Street, Room 217
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6215
Tel: 650-387-7492
E-Mail: marcmere@sas.upenn.edu
AB  - During the contest for Kansas attorney general in 2006, an organization sent out 6 pieces of mail criticizing the incumbent's conduct in office.  We exploit a discontinuity in the rule used to select which households received the mailings to identify the causal effect of mail on vote choice and voter turnout.  We find these mailings had both a statistically and politically significant effect on the challenger's vote share.  Our estimates suggest that a ten percentage point increase in the amount of mail sent to a precinct increased the challenger's vote share by approximately three percentage points.  Furthermore, our results suggest that the mechanism for this increase was persuasion rather than mobilization.
ER  -