Getting out the youth vote

As observed in many recent elections since the beginning of the 2000s, the youth votes less than other age categories. In industrialized countries in the last two decades, voting turnout has been in decline, a decline that has affected particularly young people (e.g.

Blais, 2000), to a variable extent from country to country, but always with a significant

“generation gap” (Wattenberg, 2002). In the United States, the situation is similar, with a low voter turnout among the youth (Walker, 2006) to which young voter initiatives strived to remediate on several occasions. As listed by Fieldhouse, Tranmer, & Russell, (2007), lower turnout among the youth as a specific group has been explained with several arguments, which more often than not refer to a delayed progression in the acquisition of habits or information: that of the habit of voting, of the relevance of elections and their related information, of a sense of duty or of integration to society; or to a lacking sense of civic duty.

The temporal dimension of the existence of the group as the subject of studies or target of policies is particularly interesting, in several ways: the convergence of well-organised and wide-reaching get-out-the-vote activity with substantial media coverage as well as with an election with clear and high stakes brought a significant increase in the share of the youth that voted at the 2004 presidential elections (Walker, 2006) but its effects

faded over time¹⁴as the group’s members shifted longitudinally to the next age category – including also many of the volunteers that drove the initiatives. For elections

occurring several years apart, it may therefore be an entirely new group that needs mobilization. Secondly, it calls attention to the persistence of these effects over time.

Do get-out-the-vote initiatives targeted to the youth do more than speed up the acquisition of norms, which would, all things being equal, be acquired by the group members to the same extent but at a later date? (D. P. Green & Gerber, 2008). While a longitudinal study has not been made of the same group, low voting activity among the youth is likely to affect voting propensity of the same individuals throughout their lives, leaving a “footprint” affecting the group’s representation once they stop belonging to the young age group (Franklin, Lyons & Marsh 2004), and the practice of voting was shown as being habit-forming in certain circumstances e.g. (Coppock & Green, 2016;

Gerber, Green, & Shachar, 2003). Starting to vote as soon as possible is therefore important, since otherwise individuals may find themselves disenfranchised at a later stage, but the persistence of the effects of proactive voter mobilization targeted to the youth has not been demonstrated.

Get-out-the-vote initiatives targeted to young voters have usually been focusing on addressing the lack of information that has been shown to undermine the youth’s participation, as well as their lack of experience in certain cases. The experiment examined by (E. Addonizio 2004) mentioned in section 3.2 focused on several

dimensions at the same time, providing information about the voting procedure and the stakes of the election in relation to the young people’s lives, letting them practice voting on a mock machine to reduce their apprehension, and additionally striving to foster a sense of belonging within the group by focusing on issues common to people in the age category. This type of get-out-the-vote initiative is widely replicated, for example in the previously mentioned League of Women Voter’s handbook.

Non-profit organisation Rock the Vote has been leading grassroots youth political mobilization in the United States. Besides more classic mobilization tactics such as spreading information about elections, Rock the Vote has organised in 2003-2004 and 2007-2008 debates aiming at including the youth better than regular debates. In 2003-2004, primary debates were organised using a “town hall” format on the youth-oriented

14 United States Elections Project, “Voter Turnout Demographics”,

http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/demographics, retrieved May 7^th, 2017.

MTV television channel, where questions to the candidates were coming from the audience, and their effects were compared to those of a classic debate moderated by journalists, to find that “the youth-targeted debate, significantly more so than the journalist-controlled debate, encouraged greater identification between young citizens and the candidates, and viewers of the “Rock the Vote” debate expressed greater political efficacy, heightened political trust, and decreased political cynicism”

(McKinney & Rill, 2009). In 2007-2008, the experiment was a debate organised in collaboration with television channel CNN and video sharing platform Youtube, which was used to collect questions to be asked from the presidential candidates. While debates were found, again, to reduce political cynicism in their viewers and therefore encourage political engagement and participation, the format, which relied on a new technology favoured by the youth and focused on questions asked by the “regular citizen”, did not affect significantly the results, which were statistically similar for viewers of a regular, journalist-moderated debate: the viewers’ confidence in their political knowledge improved, which is recognized as a factor in voting (Matsusaka, 1995).

Informing newly enfranchised citizens about their voting rights as early as possible and in a practical, hands-on manner affects positively participation among the youth, but beyond a purely informational effect, be it related to voting practice or partisan positions, the exact mechanisms that govern this increase call for further research. In particular, the limitations of the impact of get-out-the-vote initiatives on a longer term need to be examined carefully from a propensity perspective (whether the subjects who acquired voting behaviour earlier would have acquired it to the same extent at a later date). The thematic approach adopted in most of the initiatives seems to yield results, but again, whether the effect was amplified because the topics were close to the subjects’ lives, or because their sense of belonging to a group was increased, is not tested. The relative efficiency of tailored voter mobilization attempts is therefore not conclusive, while exposition to information likely to increase voter mobilization, without a specific focus or without using technology considered as native to the group studied, shows that in most respects young citizens as a target group are also receptive to information and communication not directed at them in particular.