Social influence and political mobilization: Further evidence from a randomized experiment in the 2012 U.S. presidential election

Jason J Jones; Robert M Bond; Eytan Bakshy; Dean Eckles; James H Fowler

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0173851

Social influence and political mobilization: Further evidence from a randomized experiment in the 2012 U.S. presidential election

PLoS One. 2017 Apr 26;12(4):e0173851. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0173851. eCollection 2017.

Authors

Jason J Jones^{1

2}, Robert M Bond³, Eytan Bakshy⁴, Dean Eckles⁴, James H Fowler^{5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, United States of America.
² Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, United States of America.
³ School of Communication, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States of America.
⁴ Facebook, Menlo Park, California, United States of America.
⁵ Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States of America.
⁶ Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States of America.

Abstract

A large-scale experiment during the 2010 U.S. Congressional Election demonstrated a positive effect of an online get-out-the-vote message on real world voting behavior. Here, we report results from a replication of the experiment conducted during the U.S. Presidential Election in 2012. In spite of the fact that get-out-the-vote messages typically yield smaller effects during high-stakes elections due to saturation of mobilization efforts from many sources, a significant increase in voting was again observed. Voting also increased significantly among the close friends of those who received the message to go to the polls, and the total effect on the friends was likely larger than the direct effect, suggesting that understanding social influence effects is potentially even more important than understanding the direct effects of messaging. These results replicate earlier work and they add to growing evidence that online social networks can be instrumental for spreading offline behaviors.

MeSH terms

Humans
Politics*
Public Opinion
Social Networking*
United States

Grants and funding

The authors received no specific funding for this work. Facebook, Inc., provided support in the form of salaries for authors EB and DE but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The manuscript was reviewed by multiple employees at Facebook, Inc., not involved in the research. The specific roles of EB and DE are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.