Why Should You Vote?

The problem and why it is important

        Voter apathy is a problem in the United Kingdom, particularly among young people. Overall voter turnout has declined over the last few decades, from 84% in the 1950 general election to just 66.1% in 2015 (The British Psychological Society, 2016). Furthermore, young people are less likely to vote than older people. Voter turnout was just 57% for those aged 18-19 in the 2017 general election, compared to a turnout of 83% for those aged 70 or over (YouGov, 2017).

        The problem of voter apathy is important because, without sufficient voter turnout, both elected individuals and their mandates lack legitimacy. In order for democracy to function correctly and represent all groups within the population, it is crucial to tackle the apathy among young voters. This issue affects more than just general elections, also affecting local elections and smaller elections such as the election of officers to university student unions. We believe that the voter apathy visible through low general election turnouts is reflective of a broader disinterest in politics among young people, and this is what our project aims to tackle.

Who is the target audience and how is the project aimed at them?

        The most accessible group of young people for our project to target was Warwick University students. Research has identified a framework of behaviour change which involves communicating more effectively to a target audience by focussing on issues that are important to them (Fogg, 2009). We recognised that the date for the next general election in the UK is 2022. Therefore, in order to make our campaign most constructive during the target timeframe, we decided to focus on increasing voting at the 2019 SU elections held at the end of February.

        We hope that by changing attitudes towards voting, the individuals targeted by our campaign will increase their voting behaviour not only in the SU elections but also in future political elections.  Research suggests that past behaviour influences future behaviour (Cialdini, 2009) and that the act of voting itself can increase later voting behaviour (Coppock & Green, 2016).

What is the intervention?

        We combined two forms of intervention, a poster and a video, in order to access both the central and peripheral routes of persuasion as outlined by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

The Poster

        We designed this poster to be colourful and straightforward in line with the persuasion techniques discussed below. The posters were put up in multiple places around campus so that students will walk past them several times, in order to increase exposure effects.

The Video

        Click on this link to watch our video!

What techniques were used and why are they applicable to the target audience?

The Poster

        The word “indifference” is crossed out and corrected to say “make a difference”. This design aims to highlight the juxtaposition between the indifference of voter apathy compared to the difference that voting makes on the outcome of democratic elections. Furthermore, we chose the word “indifference” with the aim of creating a negative social norm around the concept of voter apathy. The adjective “indifferent” was rated as abstract rather than concrete according to the Sussex Affective Word List (Citron, Weekes, & Ferstl, 2014), which contributes to its negative connotations because research has indicated that abstract words are construed more negatively than concrete words (Hills & Adelman, 2015; Yao et al., 2016).

        Overall, the design of the poster is deliberately simple in order to target the peripheral route of persuasion as described in the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). In particular, we felt that the peripheral route was suited to a poster about voter apathy because the disinterest associated with low voter turnout (The British Psychological Society, 2016) is likely to decrease an individual’s willingness to pay attention to detailed arguments (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). We felt that the detail of our campaign would be better suited to a video format.

        By placing the poster in many conspicuous places, we also aim to increase the perceived positive subjective norms of voting through mere exposure (Glasford, 2008). Fogg’s (2009) behavioural model outlines that if the target audience is capable of engaging in the target behaviour then a simple signal is sufficient to remind them to engage in that behaviour. The aim is that through providing multiple signals to vote in the form of posters, students will feel an implicit social pressure which will motivate them to engage in the target behaviour of voting in the SU elections.

The Video

        We designed the video both to work alone as a useful persuasion tool, and also to complement the simplicity of the poster design. Videos can be easily shared through social media, increasing the exposure of our campaign. We utilised techniques from advertising and marketing research in order to increase the positive reception of our video. Through sharing the video on social media, we aim to meet Fogg’s (2009) recommendation for increasing audience engagement through maximising the possible reach and exposure of the campaign.

        The style of the video is informal, showing a person’s hand, writing critical pieces of information on sheets of paper. Research has found that students engage more positively with informational videos that are lower-budget and have a more personal feeling than high-end studio-produced videos  (Guo, Kim, & Rubin, 2014). Furthermore, this research also found that videos featuring a “Khan Academy” drawing style are more effective than those with Powerpoint slides; therefore, we decided to use a handwritten and hand-drawn style for our video.

        The background music is upbeat yet does not distract from the message. We chose to use cheerful music in the background because advertising research has found that music can peripherally lead to a positive attitude about the conveyed message (Stout & Leckenby, 1988), and can affect related behaviour, for example increasing purchasing behaviour as a result of consumer advertisements (Gorn, 1982). We hope to utilise this technique in order to increase how positively our audience receives the campaign message to increase voting in the SU elections.

        Finally, our video expands on why voter apathy is a critical issue, providing a complete argument to persuade our audience to vote at the SU elections. In the video, we have focussed on aspects of the SU elections which are favourable and relevant to the student community, such as online accessibility, and how the outcome of the vote can directly affect their student experience, for example through welfare decisions. In this way, the video follows Fogg’s (2009) framework for effective communication with the target audience by focussing on the issues that are important to them.

        Overall, our campaign design utilises both the central and peripheral routes of persuasion, through a video and poster respectively. We have maximised our campaign reach by sharing the video on social media and placing the poster in numerous conspicuous locations around campus. Our aim is not only to increase voter turnout at the SU elections this year, but furthermore, we hope to change the attitudes of the student body in order to increase their voting behaviour in the future as well.

References

Cialdini, R. (2009). Influence: Science and Practice, 5th Edition(5th ed.). Pearson. Retrieved from https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Cialdini-Influence-Science-and-Practice-5th-Edition/PGM263677.html

Citron, F. M. M., Weekes, B. S., & Ferstl, E. C. (2014). How are affective word ratings related to lexicosemantic properties? Evidence from the Sussex Affective Word List. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35(02), 313–331.

Coppock, A., & Green, D. P. (2016). Is Voting Habit Forming? New Evidence from Experiments and Regression Discontinuities: IS VOTING HABIT FORMING? American Journal of Political Science, 60(4), 1044–1062.

Fogg, B. (2009). A behavior model for persuasive design. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology - Persuasive ’09(p. 1). Claremont, California: ACM Press.

Glasford, D. E. (2008). Predicting Voting Behavior of Young Adults: The Importance of Information, Motivation, and Behavioral Skills. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38(11), 2648–2672.

Gorn, G. J. (1982). The Effects of Music in Advertising on Choice Behavior: A Classical Conditioning Approach. Journal of Marketing, 46(1), 94–101.

Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014). How Video Production Affects Student Engagement: An Empirical Study of MOOC Videos. In In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Learning at Scale (pp. 4–5).

How Britain voted at the 2017 general election | YouGov. (2017). Retrieved 26 February 2019, from https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/06/13/how-britain-voted-2017-general-election

Hills, T. T., & Adelman, J. S. (2015). Recent evolution of learnability in American English from 1800 to 2000. Cognition, 143, 87–92.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology(Vol. 19, pp. 123–205). Elsevier.

Stout, P. A., & Leckenby, J. D. (1988). Let the music play: music as a nonverbal element in television commercials. In S. Hecker & D. W. Stewart (Eds.), Nonverbal Communication in Advertising(pp. 207–233). Lexington MA: Lexington Books.

The British Psychological Society. (2016). Behaviour change: Voter apathy. Retrieved from https://www1.bps.org.uk/system/files/Public%20files/Comms-media/Voter%20apathy%20briefing%20ID813.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0LTOxhPBP7kDfeEh7mQpZbqnSDacDTx5cb9BdZhemW40PKZo_4hPhQhSk

Yao, Z., Yu, D., Wang, L., Zhu, X., Guo, J., & Wang, Z. (2016). Effects of valence and arousal on emotional word processing are modulated by concreteness: Behavioral and ERP evidence from a lexical decision task. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 110, 231–242.