Voting to Avoid Social Sanctions: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania

Voter turnout in many developing democracies is high despite limited electoral com- petition and substantial participation costs. When turnout is publicly observable, can the threat of social sanctions for abstention increase costly participation? I test this mechanism in a lab-in-the-field experiment conducted in 82 rural villages around the 2015 general election in Tanzania. Groups of community members made public voting decisions and half of the groups were randomly assigned to a rule that temporarily ex- cluded abstainers from group discussion, a sanction designed to mirror one documented in fieldwork and national survey evidence. The treatment increases turnout by 10 to 15 percentage points relative to a control-group rate of 53 percent. These experimental results provide evidence that when abstention from a costly, publicly observable civic act carries a credible social consequence, participation increases. The findings both help explain persistently high turnout in low-competition settings and identify a lever for mobilization in low- and middle-income countries where community participation norms exist, by making the social cost of abstention salient at the moment of the decision.