Digital turnout mobilization: Enhancing voter turnout with digital messaging

Abstract Voter turnout is declining across Europe, raising concerns about democratic legitimacy and prompting a search for effective mobilization strategies. The new digital era has transformed the landscape for political communication, making it possible to mobilize voters through direct digital messages. These messages have proven to be a low-cost and easily scalable tool, capable of reaching millions of voters efficiently and with broad coverage. We synthesize existing evidence through a comprehensive meta-analysis of voter mobilization experiments from the past decade that apply digital messages as a Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) tool. The analysis assesses the overall effectiveness of digital messaging in increasing turnout, with particular attention to its potential for engaging marginalized groups and promoting participatory equality. Second, we present results from a new population-wide GOTV experiment conducted during the 2024 European Parliament election in Denmark – the first to apply digital messages to the entire electorate. The intervention increased turnout by 0.5 percentage points. By using year-of-birth bins to estimate effects across all age cohorts and disaggregating the immigrant category into Western and non-Western subpopulations, we can examine previously unexplored in-depth heterogeneous effects. We find that digital messages consistently have positive effects on turnout, including among marginalized voters.