Why don’t young people vote, and what can be done about it?

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. Our 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 of them.

The sample of two dozen countries isn’t representative of all nations. The 24 countries that had turnout data available were richer, more democratic and more literate than the 168 countries we contacted 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 inf luenced by what they see their friends and peers doing, and older people are more likely to have observed friends making the choice to vote, over the course of several election cycles.

• 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.

In the United States, some of those obstacles are, or once were,

Interestingly, that gap shrinks reliably as voting increases. In other words, the higher the youth voting rate, the closer the youth rate is likely to be to the overall rate.

intentional.

“I think of the U. S. as an anomaly when it comes to disparities in turnout across groups, and that those disparities are inseparable from a legacy of slavery and racism,” said Charlotte Hill, a doctoral candidate working on voting issues at UC Berkeley.

Raising voter turnout among all cohorts isn’t a universal goal among the politically powerful. And policies that make voting harder, like voter ID laws, may disproportionately affect low- propensity voters, including young people.

• A lternative par ticipation. 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 politic a l engagement ,” according to research by the Stockholm- based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Data suggests these trends are especially pronounced among young people. Compared with their elders in Germany, France and Britain, one analysis found, younger people are more likely to sign petitions, and more than twice as likely to par ticipate in demonstrations.

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%), care who is president ( 74%), have interest in public affairs (85%), and intend to vote (83%) is especially high.”

Is the gap between young and older voters consistent around the world?

No. A mon g t he 24 countries we examined, the difference between youth and general turnout ranged from less than 1 percentage point to more than 20 points.

A nd a lthough the United States isn’t alone in seeing a gap, it fares pretty dismally, with the fifth- lowest youth turnout in the sample and the four th- biggest gap between youth and overall turnout.

But before scolding young Americans, look at their elders. In countries where older people vote at higher rates, young people do, too.

Interestingly, that gap shrinks reliably as voting increases. In other words, the higher the youth voting rate, the closer the youth rate is likely to be to the overall rate.