Voting and civic engagement: Results from an online field experiment

Abstract

How does voting interact with civic engagement outside the electoral process? An online field experiment on more than 140,000 registered voters in San Francisco yielded two main results. Subjects who voted in the 2016 primary elections were nearly three times more likely to open a survey from a nonprofit organization than those who did not vote in the primary election. However, explicitly priming voter identity and gratitude made all subjects far less likely to engage in this form of civic participation.