CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2010
| Author | Buzarnescu, Bogdana Alexandra |
|---|---|
| Title | Can get-out-the-vote events increase voter turnout? A study of the 2009 presidential elections in Romania |
| Summary | Why do people vote the way they do and what can candidates do to sway the votes of those that go to the polls? Do people cast their votes based on the policies advanced by a candidate, rational self-interest, or political campaigns and the get-the-vote-out efforts (e.g. campaign appearances, advertising, door-to-door canvassing, leaflets, phone banks, electronic mail)? Which one of these influences most the number of votes a candidate gets in elections? Recent studies in voting behaviour point out to an increased importance of get-the-vote-out strategies. The purpose of the present paper is to explore the effects of one type of get-the-vote-out efforts – more precisely, local visits by the candidate or incumbent in a certain constituency – and the strategies politicians employ in order to increase the number of votes they get. I take as a case study the Romanian 2009 presidential election. I look at whether the abovementioned type of get-the-vote-out efforts made a difference in the number of votes the candidates got. Social scientists have recently started to pay increasing attention to matching in an attempt to infer causation based on experiments that rely on observational studies. In order to test my hypotheses I use matching as a main method. In addition to it, I conducted content analysis on printed and audio-visual media and run several OLS regressions. The results show that only one candidate’s campaign appearances were marginally significant in statistical terms and did have an effect on the number of votes that candidate got. |
| Supervisor | Levente Littvay |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/buzarnescu_bogdana-alexandra.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University