"We have seen the power of a single mailer disclosing the voting behavior of oneself and one’s neighbors."

"Does this effect persist over time, in the form of newly created voting habit?" asks an academic study (PDF) linked by Professor Jacobson, as he discusses that creepy mailer that showed my name and my neighbors' names and whether we'd voted in the last 2 elections. From the study:

The remarkable effectiveness of the social pressure appeals contrasts with the relatively modest effects observed in previous studies of the effectiveness of direct mail voter mobilization campaigns....

The difference between our intervention and mail used in previous experiments is that ours harnesses one of the most formidable forces in social psychology, pressure to conform to social norms....

Decades of survey research have suggested that people implicitly defer to the norm of voting, insofar as they tend to exaggerate their past rates of voter turnout....

From a theoretical vantage point, the sheer magnitude of the surveillance effect suggests an important new line of attack for scholars seeking to explain long-term declines in voter turnout.... 

The surveillance effect! It's important for people to know when political organizations, like the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, are deliberately using a psychological manipulation that has been tested and studied. Please, get out the word that mailers like this are trying to mobilize...

The Surveillance Effect.