Editor’s note: Reposted with the kind permission of Brian Frank. The original post can be found here.

The gist of Connected, the excellent book about the power of social networks, is that the most important factor in whether a person will do something — e.g. donate to charity, gain weight, steal a car, or simply smile — is whether the people around them are doing it too.

It isn’t true of everything, but yes it certainly is true of voting, according to the book:

It is well known that when you decide to vote it also increases the chance that our friends, family, and coworkers will vote. This happens in part because they imitate you… and in part because you make direct appeals to them. And we know that direct appeals work… This simple, old-fashioned, person-to-person technique is still the primary tool used by the sprawling political machines in modern-day elections.

Interestingly, authors Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler manage to address the “rational” notion that one person’s vote doesn’t really count (in a purely rational sense, it doesn’t) by showing that one vote counts because of the network effects it can cause: when you vote, your friends are more likely to vote too, so “instead of each of us having only one vote, we effectively have several.”

They took the probabilities found in existing research (i.e. if one person you have regular discussions about politics with votes — people have about 5 such “partners,” on average — then you are 15% more likely to vote too) and plugged them into computer models to see how one person’s vote might “cascade” through social networks. On average, one vote would generate about three more votes. And in some cases, cascades reached as high as one hundred additional votes!

(They found that the more polarized a network is — which is to say, the more connected we are to like-minded people while being less connected to people with different views — then cascades will have a greater effect. Results would also depend on how “central” the first voter is, i.e. if their friends each have a lot of friends, then their vote will affect influence more people at two and three degrees of separation.)

Perhaps the most interesting study was done by researchers who went to the doors of two-person households encouraging people to vote. As a control group they encouraged other households to recycle. They found after the election that people who answered the door and were encouraged to vote were 10% more likely to do so than those encouraged to recycle. Most interesting was that their partners and housemates — though the researchers didn’t speak to them directly — were also more likely to vote (about 6% more).

It’s important that voter mobilization initiatives take note of this research. Otherwise efforts that aim to have a mass effect may be counterproductive: i.e. the time spent pulling people together to plan and manage big initiatives might be better spent spreading out across neighbourhoods and engaging people where they’re already congregating.

I suspect that programs like Rock the Vote work insofar as they serve as venues or points of reference for communications between individuals, or for people to spread the message to more of their friends. For example, an event can bring people together, but if the people at the event aren’t saying, “I’m voting and so should you” — not just to others at the event but to other people in their network — then it’s just theatre. Likewise, if everybody participating in the event was already going to vote anyway, it’s an exercise in mutual self-affirmation.

In other words, the message needs to be contagious: the question isn’t how to mobilize people, it’s what do people need in order to mobilize their friends…

One way of thinking about voter mobilization is something like a “two-step flow” approach, based on findings (note: from the 1940′s) that political messages in mass media didn’t affect everybody directly, but rather affected “opinion leaders” who then spread the message through their social networks. (People who have read The Tipping Point may be reminded here of connecters, mavens & salesmen).

I don’t necessarily subscribe to that theory exactly as it is, but it certainly has heuristic value: instead of thinking in terms of what the message is, think in terms of what people will do with it to ensure the message will be contagious and spread through the second and third degrees of participants’ networks.

Tell a story people will tell their friends…

About the author: Brian Frank is a creative journeyman, freelance writer and thinker. Based in London Ontario Canada, Brian is a member of the city’s open government movement, blogger, event co-organizer & volunteer, and an occasional speaker on learning and creativity.