ORIGINAL PAPER Are Voters Mobilized by a ‘Friend-and-Neighbor’ on the Ballot? Evidence from a Field Experiment Costas Panagopoulos 1 • Jan E. Leighley 2 • Brian T. Hamel 3 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract In his seminal work on Southern politics, V.O. Key observed that voters disproportionately support local candidates at the ballot box. While empirical analyses have confirmed ‘‘friends-and-neighbors’’ voting across numerous electoral contexts, no one has directly examined voter turnout as the mechanism linking place of residence to vote choice. We argue that place of residence is a social identity that incentivizes citizens to turn out to vote on behalf of the local candidate. We test this mobilization mechanism using a randomized field experiment conducted during a 2014 state legislative primary election. Our results show that county ties between candidates and voters likely boost turnout. Our findings contribute to our under- standing of the importance of place identity for turnout decisions in low-information elections. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11109-016-9383-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Costas Panagopoulos costas@post.harvard.edu Jan E. Leighley leighley@american.edu Brian T. Hamel bhamel@ucla.edu 1 Department of Political Science, Fordham University, 441 East Fordham Road, Faber Hall 667, Bronx, NY 10458-5149, USA 2 Department of Government, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20016-8130, USA 3 Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles, 4289 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472, USA 123 Polit Behav DOI 10.1007/s11109-016-9383-3