Election Intervention Survey 2008, Experimental Evidence on Female Voting Behavior

A typical sample cluster yielded about 15 sample households and 41 sample women. In total, 2,736 women from 1,018 households were reached. During the door-to-door visit, basic data on each sample household was collected, including the GPS location of the house and a basic roster of all adult women with their past voting record and the name and address of their closest friend or confidant in the village. The confidant was selected as follows: in every even numbered household, the confidant of a woman who was either a daughter or a daughter in law of the household head was selected, while in every odd numbered household, the confidant of the household head (if the head was a woman) or the head’s wife, sister, mother or aunt was selected. Not all households yielded at least one “eligible” woman using this rule, so the final sample includes 797 confidants. Of these, almost all were in the same cluster as the sample women who identified them, but only 18 confidants were also in a sampled household. The door-to-door visit took 20 to 25 minutes for treated households and 5 to 10 minutes for control households. No selected household refused to be interviewed, although in a few cases a repeat visit took place on the same day. None of the households refused to participate in the awareness campaign.

Vote verification took place between the evening of February 18th, Election Day, and allday February 19th. On the evening of February 19th, the survey firm sent out a field team to each village to check 10 percent of the verifier’s assignment at random. They found no significant differences. However, the village based vote verifiers were unable to locate 99 sample women (in 27 households), roughly 3 percent of the sample. The final sample, therefore, has 2637 women and 991 households. All 797 confidants were found and their vote verified. Attrition is, therefore, quite low and unrelated to treatment assignment (see Panel A, Appendix Table OA8). In addition, 158 women claimed to have cast a vote but did not have the requisite ink mark. To be conservative, we treat these women as not having voted although the results do not change when these women are coded as voters.