Paper In Progress
Cluster: Civic Engagement
Co-Managers: Samantha Natividad, Liliana Roginski, Kate SantaMaria, & Emma Li
Research Associates: Chris Byrnes, Beaux Lizewski, Casey McCarthy, Abby Miles, & Ronnie Ward
Research Assistants: Will Adams, Traian Beleac, Maddie Bell, Sasha Carter, Dimitri Chernozhukov, Jermaine Conyers, Reese Dawson, Abby Giordano, Peter Godziela, Brenda Gomez, Victoria Hutchinson, Alana Kipnis, Sophia Lombardo, Aidan Mahaffey, Jack Maloney, Jaylene Martinez, Makenna McCall, Alexa McCarus, Cam McKnight, Brynne Mushlin, Grace Needles, Ericka Nimbley, Dana Pletter, Natacha Ross, Dashawn Sheffield, Zach Sussman, Tyler Troutman, & Ben Waterman
What is the Rivalry Framing Project?
How do layered outreach and rivalry framing affect political participation on a college campus? These questions build on pre-existing literature surrounding methods to increase youth political engagement by introducing a variety of creative, personalized outreach methods while also expanding on outcome measures of political and civic engagement that go beyond voter registration and voter turnout (Gerber and Green 2000). Researchers have shown that youth intervention programs in high school and college in administration-led curricula and through peer-to-peer mentoring can increase voter registration and turnout (Beaumont et al. 2006; Stroup et al. 2013; Hill and Lachelier 2014). In this study, peer-to-peer connections assessed the impact of social pressure and showcased how social networks from student groups can impact mobilization. Our study primarily examined the effects of sustained, layered, peer-to-peer outreach with neutral, civic engagement framing in contrast to rivalry framing that emphasized competition for voter outcomes between a local rival school. While not statistically significant at conventional levels, we found a slight negative effect on turnout when we sent emails with neutral messaging and no effects for the other treatment groups. These results provide further evidence of the intricacies and specificity of messages required to increase youth political and civic engagement on college campuses.






