Do Early Voters Try to Mobilize Others?

Early voting has been pitched as a way to help boost voter turnout in the United States. The evidence pointing to a positive association between the availability of early voting and electoral participation is decidedly mixed, however. Some studies have even found that provisions for early voting are negatively correlated with aggregate voter turnout. The explanations that have been offered for this surprising, negative relationship vary to some degree. One popular theory centers on declines in social pressure that might be expected to accompany large numbers of highly-engaged voters casting their ballots well in advance of Election Day. Equally as surprising as these negative findings is the fact that the mechanisms that have been proposed by way of an explanation for their existence have yet to see a direct test in the literature. In this article, we remedy this lacuna by exploring the relationship between early voting and political talk and mobilization efforts at the individual level using several years of ANES and CES data. Our results exhibit a great deal of nuance. However, after focusing on the set of cases that are the most likely to exhibit the theorized (negative) effects of having voted early, we do find consistent evidence that those who cast their ballots in advance of the day of the election engaged in lower levels of political talk. Our study thereby lends some credence to the idea that early voting may be associated with declines in the peer-to-peer transmission of electorally relevant social pressures.