Shankar Vedantam is back in the Post, reporting on an ingenious experiment based on the little-known fact that voting records are public (i.e., whether or not you voted is public). Academic researchers found people who knew whether their neighbors voted last time and who were warned their behavior in a current election would be publicized, increased their participation by 27 percent.
Some questions are unanswered: the base participation rate was about 30 percent voting (municipal type election, not national), so the increase was presumably to 40 percent. What would be interesting, in the light of the "Bowling Alone" thesis (Americans no longer join organizations, etc.) would be to identify differences among neighborhoods, perhaps as a measure of social cohesion.
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