Voting Age Research Articles

Voting at 16? Youth suffrage is up for debate

In the debate on lowering the voting age, possible consequences have been discussed, among which are turn-out and the quality of the vote choice of newly enfranchised teenagers. Although findings on the turn-out of 16- and 17-year-olds are encouraging to supporters of youth suffrage, the results on political maturity are somewhat mixed. Most results stem from the case of Austria, where the voting age was lowered to 16 in 2007. They are supplemented with results of the Norwegian Voting Age Trial.

Against a minimum voting age

A minimum voting age is defended as the most effective and least disrespectful means of ensuring all members of an electorate are sufficiently competent to vote. Whilst it may be reasonable to require competency from voters, a minimum voting age should be rejected because its view of competence is unreasonably controversial, it is incapable of defining a clear threshold of sufficiency and an alternative test is available which treats children more respectfully. This alternative is a procedural test for minimum electoral competence. A procedural test for minimum electoral competence also succeeds in fulfilling adults’ duties to promote children’s rational and moral engagement with democracy. A minimum voting age should therefore be rejected, all things considered. A procedural test for minimum literacy and independent voting is the most justified means to ensure competency from voters and to promote the democratic agency of children.

Day-to-Day Political Engagement Partially Mediates the Effect of Competition on Voting

How does living in a battleground state during a presidential election affect an individual's political engagement? We utilize a unique collection of 113 million status updates on Facebook to answer this persistent question in the study of political behavior by comparing users’ political discussion during the 2008 presidential election in politically competitive versus uncompetitive states. Battleground state users are significantly more likely to discuss politics in the campaign season than are blackout state users, and posting a political status update --- a form of day-to-day engagement with politics --- affects a person’s self-reported voter turnout, mediating approximately 20% of the relationship between exposure to political competition and turnout. While our results can only be generalized to the tens of millions of Facebook users and not the entire American voting age population, this paper is one of the first efforts to use the massive quantity of data generated through online social media sites to explain the microfoundations of how people think, feel, and act on a daily basis in response to their political environment.

Should the Voting Age be Lowered to Sixteen? Normative and Empirical Considerations

This article is an examination of the issue of whether the age of electoral majority should be lowered to sixteen. We consider and reject several arguments raised by both sides of the voting age debate. The key issue, we claim, is the political maturity of young people. Drawing on empirical data collected in nationally representative surveys, we argue that the weight of such evidence suggests that young people are, to a significant degree, politically less mature than older people, and that the voting age should not be lowered to sixteen.

The decline of citizen participation in electoral politics in post-authoritarian Chile

Turnout among registered voters remains high in post-authoritarian Chile, but valid votes as a percentage of the voting-age population have fallen significantly in the post-authoritarian period and blank/null voting, non-registration, and abstention are on the rise. Why? This article tests three rival explanations: (1) lack of political support; (2) depoliticization; and (3) a generational shift in political culture. These theories are not mutually exclusive, but rather explain distinct contours of this electoral phenomenon. Compared to valid voters, blank/null voters exhibit less support for the political system, are less politicized, and more likely to have reached legal voting age during the democratic transition. Although non-registrants also exhibit less political support and are more depoliticized than valid voters, their behaviour is largely explained by a new political culture that stresses individual as opposed to collective participation. In addition to shedding light on this Chilean puzzle, the findings enhance the debates over electoral participation, mandatory voting, and quality of democracy in Latin America and other nascent democracies.

Is there any substance to the “Roe effect”?

S ince abortion was legalized in the early 1970s, roughly I to 1.5 million abortions are performed each year. Recently, some have conjectured that the magnitude of these numbers may be altering political outcomes. If those pregnancies that were aborted were more likely to have been democratic voters, the reasoning goes, then there are far fewer democratic voters now than there would have been had the Supreme Court ruled differently in Roe v. Wade. This effect has been labeled the "Roe Effect." To date, the Roe Effect remains pure conjecture. Yet over the past decade or so, a considerable amount of academic research has been conducted, and continues to be conducted, on the impact of abortion policy on a range of social outcomes. The knowledge gained from this research can be brought to bear on the merits of the argument. What was the impact of abortion legalization on fertility? Did the reduction in fertility represent a permanent one, or just a shift in the timing of childbearing? Did abortion legalization alter the attributes of those children who were born? All of these issues speak directly to the feasibility of the Roe Effect. Although it is impossible to determine credibly the validity of the hypothesis without a counterfactual, it is possible to address whether the argument is at all consistent with what we know about the effect of abortion legalization. That is the goal of this essay. The first point that should be made is that the Roe Effect is based upon a faulty premise. James Taranto, who first proposed the Roe Effect, states "it is a statemerit of fact, not a moral judgment, to observe that every pregnancy aborted today results in one fewer eligible voter 18 years from now." He then points out that 40 million abortions have been performed since 1973, when the Roe decision was handed down. Larry Eastland similarly expresses that "there were 12,274,368 in the Voting Age Population of 205,815,000 missing from the 2000 Presidential election, because of abortions from 1973-1982." These statements are simply incorrect. They are based upon a common, but faulty, assumption that women have no control over their likelihood of becoming pregnant. If people engage in sexual activity (or not), or choose to use birth control (or not), independent of outside influences, then their statistical statements would be valid, In other words, if pregnancies were independent of outside influences, then every additional abortion would reflect an additional birth (well, almost we still would need to ignore the fact that some of the aborted pregnancies would have resulted in miscarriage, and women who abort can get pregnant again sooner). One could plausibly argue the contrary. Couples make decisions about their sexual activity and/or contraceptive use, taking into consideration relevant factors in their environment. This is the fundamental premise of an economic model of fertility. In such a model, women/ couples make decisions regarding pregnancy and childbirth by weighing the relevant benefits and costs, monetary or otherwise, The legal status of abortion is clearly an important component of the cost of a pregnancy. Even if childbirth is not the goal, women would be more reluctant to get pregnant if they knew that ending that pregnancy would be very expensive, as it would be if that resolution was an illegal abortion. Therefore, there is no obvious relationship between the number of abortions performed and the number of children who would have been born in the absence of those abortions, An additional abortion may represent a child who would have been born otherwise, or a pregnancy that would not have occurred otherwise. Yet the credibility of the Roe Effect has little to do with the rhetorical nature of the claimed magnitude of missing democratic voters, All that is required is that abortion [egatization needs to have reduced the number of children born. In fact, the impact on the number of children born does not have to be large at all for the effect to work. Although it sounds good to claim that 12 million additional voters could have swayed the 2000 election, it turns out that only a few hundred would have done ~he 'Lrick. This leads us to the first question thai can be addressed by academic research: By how much did abor-

Internal and External Effects on the Accuracy of NES Turnout: Reply

In an earlier issue of this journal I brought attention to the fact that estimates of voter turnout in U.S. presidential elections from the National Election Study (NES) series have been increasingly biased. Although researchers had already noted that the NES overestimated turnout, I was concerned with the growing severity of the problem. While admitting that other factors were at work, my explanation centered on the representativeness of surveys, in particular that selection bias in the sample is correlated with the likelihood of voting (Burden 2000). Martinez (2003) and McDonald (2003) offer three possible additions to my argument. First, panel effects are responsible for particularly egregious discrepancies in a few presidential elections, particularly in the 1996 survey. Second, official turnout statistics that rely on the Voting Age Population (VAP) are themselves biased and lack perfect comparability with the NES. Third, the degree of misreporting might also depend on actual voter turnout.

The First Seven Years of the Political Life Cycle

One of the most noteworthy characteristics of American elections is the low turnout of young people. Hypotheses purporting to explain this phenomenon focus on life-cycle transitions that define adulthood, like marriage or leaving school. For a variety of reasons that we explain, previous research has failed to test these propositions. We identify six such adult roles and estimate their effects on turnout of young citizens. We find that most of these transitions do not enhance the turnout of the young. iN 4 ost Americans reaching voting age fail to take advantage of their first opportunities to participate in a presidential election. In v a g 1996, for example, votes were cast by just 40 percent of citizens aged 18 to 24, compared to 78 percent of people in their sixties, the peak decade for turnout.1 Political scientists seeking to explain why turnout rises with age usually rely on hypotheses implicitly drawn from a theory that identifies transitions in the early adult life cycle and hypothesizes that they promote turnout. We elaborate this theory of adult-roles (Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980, 55-58) and then evaluate it by subjecting its assumptions and predictions to empirical verification.

Deciding who has the right to vote: a comparative analysis of election laws

The paper analyses seven potential restrictions to the right to vote in 63 democracies. Only two of these restrictions have given rise to a near consensus. An overwhelming majority of democracies have decided that the minimum voting age should be 18 and that the right to vote of mentally deficient people should be restricted. There is little consensus about whether the right to vote should be restrcited to citizens, about whether there should be country or electoral district residence requirements, about which electors residing abroad (if any) should retain their right to vote and about which prison inmates (if any) should have the right to vote. The paper also examines two factors that affect right to vote laws: British colonialism and level of political rights. The pattern found with respect to electoral systems, whereby former British colonies emulate their former ruler, is less systematic in the case of right to vote legislation. Finally, “strong” democracies are slightly more inclusive than “weak” ones when deciding who has the right to vote.

Links and Missing Links between Education, Political Knowledge, and CitizenshipWhat Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters. Michael X. Delli Carpini, Scott KeeterEducation and Democratic Citizenship in America. Norman H. Nie , Jane Junn , Kenneth Stehlik-Barry

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview EssaysLinks and Missing Links between Education, Political Knowledge, and Citizenship What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters. Michael X. Delli Carpini, Scott Keeter Education and Democratic Citizenship in America. Norman H. Nie , Jane Junn , Kenneth Stehlik-Barry Judith Torney-PurtaJudith Torney-Purta Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Education Volume 105, Number 4Aug., 1997 Sponsored by the Penn State College of Education Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/444165 Views: 21Total views on this site Citations: 15Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1997 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Valérie-Anne Mahéo, Éric Bélanger Lowering the Voting Age to 16? A Comparative Study on the Political Competence and Engagement of Underage and Adult Youth, Canadian Journal of Political Science 53, no.33 (Apr 2020): 596–617.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423920000232Chris Gregory, Yasuo Miyazaki Multilevel analysis of student civics knowledge scores, The Journal of Educational Research 111, no.33 (Dec 2016): 295–309.https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2016.1255869Meghan Condon Voice Lessons: Rethinking the Relationship Between Education and Political Participation, Political Behavior 37, no.44 (Feb 2015): 819–843.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-015-9301-0Kathryn Hendley Who Are the Legal Nihilists in Russia?, Post-Soviet Affairs 28, no.22 (May 2013): 149–186.https://doi.org/10.2747/1060-586X.28.2.149Marc Hooghe, Ruth Dassonneville The effects of civic education on political knowledge. A two year panel survey among Belgian adolescents, Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability 23, no.44 (Sep 2011): 321–339.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-011-9131-5Elizabeth Beaumont Promoting Political Agency, Addressing Political Inequality: A Multilevel Model of Internal Political Efficacy, The Journal of Politics 73, no.11 (Jul 2015): 216–231.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381610000976M. Najeeb Shafiq, Karen Ross Educational Attainment and Attitudes Towards War in Muslim Countries Contemplating War: The Cases of Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Turkey, Journal of Development Studies 46, no.88 (Sep 2010): 1424–1441.https://doi.org/10.1080/00220380903428431Josh Pasek, Lauren Feldman, Daniel Romer, Kathleen Hall Jamieson Schools as Incubators of Democratic Participation: Building Long-Term Political Efficacy with Civic Education, Applied Developmental Science 12, no.11 (Mar 2008): 26–37.https://doi.org/10.1080/10888690801910526 Lauren Feldman , Josh Pasek , Daniel Romer , and Kathleen Hall Jamieson Identifying Best Practices in Civic Education: Lessons from the Student Voices Program Feldman et al., American Journal of Education 114, no.11 (Jul 2015): 75–100.https://doi.org/10.1086/520692Orit Ichilov Civic Knowledge of High School Students in Israel: Personal and Contextual Determinants, Political Psychology 28, no.44 (Aug 2007): 417–440.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2007.00580.xArie Perliger, Daphna Canetti-Nisim, Ami Pedahzur Democratic attitudes among high-school pupils: The role played by perceptions of class climate, School Effectiveness and School Improvement 17, no.11 (Mar 2006): 119–140.https://doi.org/10.1080/09243450500405217Jana Sackman Eaton The Russian Federation Islamic Republic of Dagestan: Curricular Decentralization, Social Cohesion, and Stability, Peabody Journal of Education 80, no.11 (Jan 2005): 56–80.https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327930pje8001_4Marc Schwerdt Stories of Service: Public Service in the Children's Literature of the United States and Great Britain, Politics & Policy 31, no.22 (Jun 2003): 195–214.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2003.tb00145.xWilliam A. Galston P OLITICAL K NOWLEDGE , P OLITICAL E NGAGEMENT , AND C IVIC E DUCATION, Annual Review of Political Science 4, no.11 (Jun 2001): 217–234.https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.4.1.217Stephen P. Heyneman From the Party/State to Multiethnic Democracy: Education and Social Cohesion in Europe and Central Asia, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 22, no.22 (Jun 2016): 173–191.https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737022002173

Parties and Elections in America: The Electoral Process, by L. Sandy Maisel

Parties and Elections in America: The Electoral Process, <i>by L. Sandy Maisel</i>

Matters of life and death: social, political, and religious correlates of attitudes on abortion.

This article investigates the structure of attitudes toward abortion, using several demographic, political, and religious variables. The analysis is based on a 1978 survey of New Jersey's voting age population. Responses to questions on three aspects of the abortion issue—a constitutional ban on abortion, abortion on demand, and government funding of abortions—are combined to form a scale of support and opposition to abortion. We find that support for abortion is related to youth, high socioeconomic status, a liberal ideology, opposition to right-to-die legislation, and support for the Equal Rights Amendment. Additionally, we find that approval for abortion is not a function of religious preference, rather, attitudes on abortion are a function of intensity of religious adherence, regardless of specific religions.

The Lowering of the Voting Age in Denmark: The Referendum of September 1978

The Lowering of the Voting Age in Denmark: The Referendum of September 1978

Spain Tries Democracy Again

In 1977 the Spanish electorate was out of practice, but it limbered up quickly. Only Spaniards over sixty-four had previously cast a democratic ballot; it had been forty-one years since Spain's last free elections, and in 1936 the minimum voting age was twenty-three. Yet despite lack of voting experience, turnout in 1977 was 79 percent. Faced with a confusing number of parties whose programs sounded almost alike, the Spanish electorate on June 15 produced a thoroughly West European result. A sopa de letras of 161 parties shook down to two large parties and three small ones. Such a or first-time election was bound to evince a certain groping quality. Some parties had trouble locating their natural constituencies; many were mistaken in even presuming they had constituencies. A disjunction between electorate and parties occurred in some cases. One such party caught off its electoral base, the Christian Democrats, simply committed suicide. There was initial confusion among voters. Six weeks before the election, one-third who said they would vote couldn't say for which party. But a week before elections this was down to one-ninth. By the time they got into the voting booth, the undecideds appear to have largely divided between the two big parties. The elections were a shakedown in other ways, too. The campaign was characterized by an extraordinary amount of personal jealousy among leaders, the jealousy of too many political figures struggling to establish themselves in a political spectrum that could hold only a few. The returns left some odd men out. Extremist parties found little support. The openly fascist Alianza Nacional won not a single seat. Likewise Maoist, Trotskyist, and Anarchist grupusculos

Youth and their vote: A new day is coming

The 26th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, ratified in record time on June 30, 1971, lowered the minimum voting age from 21 to 18 years. The amendment became law only three months and seven days after its passage by Congress. Its impact on the remaining state and local elections of 1971 was limited because of residency requirements and registration laws, but the amendment could have a significant effect on 1972 elections.

Lowering Australia's voting age

Lowering Australia's voting age

Lowering the Voting Age: The Case of the Reluctant Electorate

Reduction of the minimum voting age from twenty-one to eighteen has stimulated considerable debate but little change over the past thirty years. Examining the views of a national sample of high school seniors, the authors found considerable variation by region, sex, and political awareness, but little over-all enthusiasm, in 1965, for the proposed change. They argue that the change is likely to come nevertheless. Paul Beck is completing his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Michigan; M. Kent Jennings is Professor of Political Science and a Program Director at the Survey Research Center, University of Michigan.

A Proposal for Voting Reform

Previous articleNext article No AccessDiscussionA Proposal for Voting ReformThomas E. SpencerThomas E. Spencer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 78, Number 4Jul., 1968 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/291689 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1968 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:THOMAS E. SPENCER Beyond Democracy, Beyond the Law: A New Statement on Academic Freedom, Educational Theory 21, no.44 (Oct 1971): 434–443.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.1971.tb00533.x

Lowering the Voting Age in Georgia

Research Article| July 01 1945 Lowering the Voting Age in Georgia Franklin L. Burdette Franklin L. Burdette Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1945) 44 (3): 300–307. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-44-3-300 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Franklin L. Burdette; Lowering the Voting Age in Georgia. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 1945; 44 (3): 300–307. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-44-3-300 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1945 by Duke University Press1945 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.