of Spanish Versus English-Language GOTV Efforts on

Latino voters comprise a growing segment of the voting electorate, yet their levels of participation in elections lags behind the general population and even other ethnic and racial groups. Recent experimental studies have found mobilization efforts directed at the Latino electorate to boost electoral turnout in federal, state, and local elections. Over the past two decades, campaign organizations and operatives have been increasingly relying on the use of Spanish-language appeals to mobilize Latinos. Surprisingly, the impact of language use in targeting Latino voters has, for the most part, eluded scholarly inquiry. We conduct a randomized field experiment in which Latino voters were randomly exposed to a mobilization message in either English or Spanish. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first randomized experiment to present a direct test between English- and Spanish-language appeals. The experiment was conducted in the context of a special elec-tion that took place in February 2009 to fill a vacancy on the New Yor