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601 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2005)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0601 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Recent Advances in the Science of Voter Mobilization By DONALD P. GREEN and ALAN S. GERBER 6 F ield experimentation is transforming the field of political behavior. Until recently, the study of voting behavior was dominated by sur- vey research. Landmark books such as Who Votes? (Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980) and Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993) mar- shaled large national surveys to show how voter turnout rates are shaped by the stringency of registration laws and exposure to mobilization activity by political campaigns and social groups. Notwithstanding their influence on scientific and policy debates, these works base their con- clusions on data with two important limitations. The dependent variable-voter turnout-is measured by asking respondents whether they voted. The independent variables-registration laws on one hand, mobilization activities on the other-are assumed to be exogenous. Both of these assumptions are potentially problematic. If respondents who live in states with easy regis- tration requirements feel embarrassed to admit that they did not vote, their misreported voting behavior may produce a spurious correlation between registration laws and putative voter turnout. If easy registration laws are passed in areas with high levels of participation or if cam- paigns direct their mobilization efforts at likely voters, the apparent effects of these contextual factors may be spurious. Concerned that survey data may provide an inadequate basis for causal inference, scholars in recent years have turned to field experimen- Donald P. Green is the A. Whitney Griswold Professorof o Political Science at Yale University and director of the LIstitution for Social and Policy Studies. Alan S. Gerber is a professor of political science at Yale University and director of the Center for the Study o f American Politics. Both authors have written extensively on the subject of voter turnout and experimental methods, recently coauthoring the book Get Out the Vote! How to Increase Voter Turnout (Brookings Institution Press, 2004). DOI: 10.1177/0002716205278406 ANNALS, AAPSS, 601, September 2005

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