The literature on authoritarian elections has provided several persuasive theories for why authoritarian regimes hold flawed elections that provide limited opportunities for regime turnover. However, existing work has been less successful at demonstrating why citizens, especially younger generations, participate in them. We probe the drivers of voting in a single-party regime using a Get Out the Vote (GOTV) experiment during the 2021 Vietnamese National Assembly (VNA) election in Ho Chi Minh City.

Building on the country’s effort to engage youth voters, we sent three different forms of government-approved voter information packets to college students. These included a civic duty treatment, explaining electoral rules and responsibilities; a candidate quality treatment, with biographical information; and a policy objective treatment with the forthcoming legislative docket. These were compared against a control group that received no electoral information. We find that none of the treatments had a positive impact on turnout or vote choice, and the candidate quality treatment even reduced turnout. However, the civic duty treatment did lead to significant and substantively meaningful increases in interest in the VNA.