» A look at why younger people don’t vote as much as other folks and what could change this.
Most young people in the United States don’t vote. Fewer than half of Americans 18 to 29 voted in the 2016 presidential election — a gap of more than 15 points compared with the overall turnout.
This is not unique to the United States. A new analysis of turnout for the most recent national general elections for heads of government in two dozen countries revealed that the general population’s voting rate exceeds the voting rate for young people in every single one.
The sample of two dozen countries isn’t representative of all nations. The 24 countries that had youth turnout data available were richer, more democratic and more literate than the 168 countries that didn’t. But the trends are still illustrative.
Why do young people vote less than their elders?
Almost a century ago, political scientists Charles E. Merriam and Harold F. Gosnell identified several groups of Americans whose turnout rates were comparatively low, including young people, minorities, the less educated and the poor — all of whom are still less likely to vote today.
Three broad themes in political science research help explain the gap for young voters:
• Habit formation. Voting is a habit formed over time, and one possible reason that young people do it less frequently is that they have had fewer opportunities to form and reinforce the habit. With time, people slowly turn from “habitual nonvoters” to “habitual voters,” as a paper by Eric Plutzer, a political scientist at Penn State, puts it.
That internal habit formation is reinforced externally, too, as Mark N. Franklin of Trinity College described in a book exploring aspects of voter turnout. People of all ages are influenced by what they see their friends and peers doing, and older people are more likely to have observed friends making the choice to vote.
• Opportunity cost. Voting for the first or second time may also be harder than voting in subsequent elections. There is a direct opportunity cost for young adults, who may have less flexible employment schedules or less financial cushion to take time off to vote, or who may be in temporary housing situations where they lack deep community ties. There is also an indirect opportunity cost to learning the process of voting, like finding a polling place and learning about the candidates, according to Franklin.
• Alternative participation. Youth turnout data may be less dispiriting when viewed in the context of participation in other forms of political action. Lower election turnout in general over time has been accompanied by a rise in “other forms of citizen activism, such as mass protests, occupy movements and increased use of social media as a new platform of political engagement,” according to research by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.
All this suggests that the problem doesn’t come down to lack of interest, as research collected in John Holbein and D. Sunshine Hillygus’s recent book “Making Young Voters,” affirms. In recent years in the United States, they write, “the number of young people who express an interest in elections (76 percent), care who is president (74 percent), have interest in public affairs (85 percent), and intend to vote (83 percent) is especially high.”
What would boost U.S. youth turnout?
Experts emphasize that there is no single fix to increase youth turnout. Instead, research points to interventions on a short, medium and long-term timeline.
• Short term: Get young people the specific information they need to register and make it to the polls.
“It drives me nuts when I hear people say, ‘It’s not that hard to go vote,’ or ‘It’s not that hard to register,’ ” said Jan Leighley, a professor of government at American University. “Actually, the act of casting a ballot in an election is incredibly complex.”
• Medium term: Work to reduce systemic barriers, especially to registration.
In her book about voter turnout, Meredith Rolfe of the University of Massachusetts points out that in U.S. elections, turnout is higher in states that make it easier to register to vote, for example by permitting it right up to an election, having registration offices that are open on evenings and weekends and allowing absentee registration.
And Anthony Fowler of the University of Chicago found that permitting future voters to preregister at age 16 or 17, making them automatically registered on their 18th birthday, increases both registration and turnout by 2.1 percentage points.
• Long term: Reimagine civics education.
“When I talk with young people, the No. 1 reason that they’re not voting is because they feel embarrassed that they don’t know what’s on the ballot, and then you ask them to go find and it and they don’t know where to go,” said Rachael Cobb, chair of political science and legal studies at Suffolk University.