Should 16-Year-Olds Vote?

The answer is probably no, and yet there is a proposal to give 16- and 17-year-olds the franchise. Yes, it's California. Yes, even more, it's San Francisco. And yes, it's a resolution that would affect only municipal (local) elections. So why am I going prattling on about this? No reason except for this line deep in the story about Joshua Cardenas' proposal:

Cardenas' resolution cites studies claiming that "16-year-olds possess roughly the same political knowledge as 21-year-olds and come close to the average for all adults."

Talk about damning with faint praise, that they're as politically knowledgeable as a 21-year-old.

Yes, but just how knowledgeable are young adults? We can get to that one easily enough, thanks to Pew. See the table below, for example (full report here). On a few issues, younger adults do okay (minimum wage, poverty), but in general, not so much.

So saying 16 and 17 year olds are as knowledgeable as young adults, that's hardly a great selling point. Look at the Israeli prime minister question, or chair of the Federal Reserve.

But this begs the question -- are 16 year olds as knowledgeable as those a few years older who can vote?

The answer is -- we don't know. It's damn difficult to survey them, and even they are surveyed students are rarely asked the same questions as adults. So, again, we don't know. Most of the studies of high schoolers are very specific, often about civics knowledge, sometimes other kinds of knowledge, but again we rarely if ever see direct comparisons to adults. I'm looking for one. If you know of one, lemme know.




 

No Pictures Please

It's the law. Don't take photos in the voting booth.

Simple enough, eh? Yet here we are, in the era of the selfie, so ya just know some self-absorbed schmuck is gonna pull out that smartphone and snap away -- and then share it on social media. Odds are no one will notice. Odds are nothing will happen, no one will care.

Unless, of course, you happen to be running for district attorney.

It's behind a paywall, but don't worry. I was quoted in the story and the reporter sent me a copy. I won't post it all here, but I'll hit the high points. Here's the lede by Amanda Thomas of the Douglas County (Ga.) Sentinel:

A photo of a ballot posted on the Facebook page of Douglas County District Attorney candidate Dalia Racine is reportedly being investigated by the Secretary of State’s office.

Racine put a photo of her electronic ballot on Facebook, along with a pic of her holding a "I voted" sticker. When the reporter called to ask about it, the photo, coincidentally I'm sure, disappeared (the reporter got a screen grab before it disappeared). But the campaign never returned the reporter's calls or commented. Dumb. She should just make a joke of it ("I just wanted everyone to know I voted for myself"), apologize, and move on. Clearly she has no campaign adviser, or at least no adviser with a clue. And, as I was quoted in the story:

“There is a great irony in the fact that someone running for the chief law enforcement officer of the county would violate the law in the voting booth,” Hollander said.

Now she's likely to be investigated for this, though apparently not by the incumbent DA due to a conflict of interest. Now that's a smart candidate.

If you're dying to see the story, I can email it to you, otherwise I try to respect a paywall.

Oh, the law itself, from the story:

O.C.G.A. Section 21-2-413(e) states, “No person shall use photographic or other electronic monitoring or recording devices, cameras, or cellular telephones while such person is in a polling place while voting is taking place.”

If Everyone Voted . . .

Clarence Page has a column riffing off a study I discussed in some detail recently, about what Democrats and Republicans know (or don't know) about current affairs and political issues.  The Page column goes further, however, in connecting what people know with voting and breaking partisan deadlock by expanding the electorate with more moderate folks.

The column itself is worth reading and his argument, while a bit simplistic, makes perfectly good sense.  Of course it can't happen here, unlike Australia, but if everyone was required by law to vote, it would result in a more balanced electorate -- if by balanced you mean a whole lot of folks forced to vote who really don't give a damn and don't care and are largely indifferent (which is very very different than being independent or non-partisan).

So should everyone be required to vote?  Only if everyone is required to read a good newspaper.  As Gore Vidal said: "Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."

Lying About Voting Intent

When people say they're going to vote, do they really vote?  Not according to this study (warning, not yet peer reviewed).  Even worse, from a research standpoint, they find many who say they're not going to vote actually voted.

The study gets at the question a number of ways.  One is simple.  Look at who said they're gonna vote in a survey and then go to the courthouse and see if they actually voted (it's a public record whether or not you voted, but not who you voted for).  They also used an experiment and some other approaches. 

To summarize, these "surprisingly inaccurate self-predictions" are full of measurement error, which can lead to all kinds of problems when you rely on them to, oh, decide on "likely voters" in a horserace poll (this is "grossly inadequate," the authors say) or even as a measure of political interest, motivation, or intent in academic studies.  The authors argue self-prediction is "far inferior to past vote history as a predictor of actual turnout."

Again, the caveat -- this manuscript is under review somewhere and has not as yet undergone a complete peer review.  As such, take the results with a grain of salt until it's been vetted by folks who are serious about this stuff.

But, there's some fascinating discussion at the end of the paper about the psychological underpinnings of saying you're gonna vote and you don't, or to me even more fascinating, saying you're not gonna vote and you do it anyway.  That latter, they argue, may in part be a function of frustration with the political process but among regular voters, the pull of Election Day is simply to much.  So pollsters in particular may be losing important data with their traditional screening questions.

Is Voting Futile? Survey says ...

This new story discusses a recent study that finds, well, here's the lede:

OTTAWA – Canada’s dismal rates of voter turnout may be rooted in negative experiences with politicians and public servants, according to a new report.

A Canadian thing?  Hardly. But the report linked to above has a great title of its first chapter:  Democracy's Great.  It's The Politics I Hate. 

I'm fairly certain you'd find the same result in the U.S.

There's long been a argument that voting is a ultimately an irrational act.  According to the Downs Paradox, the cost of voting exceeds the benefits received.  Costs come not in cash but in time spent keeping up, with making a decision, with getting to a polling place.  Toss in the ugliness of partisan politics and there's little wonder many people not only tune out of the news but are also willing to skip voting altogether.

The study in question here is based on eight focus groups.  The weakness of this methodology, of course, is a lack of generalizability.  It's strength, though, lies in deep meaningful responses, a depth of knowledge you can't really get from surveys.

To sum up:  people in the study were frustrated with the disconnect between the democracy they love and the politics they see.  

Partisan hackery and a fragmented media marketplace are drawing down that reservoir of trust so vital in a democracy. 

The reservoir, sorry to say, is running dry.

It's possible 2012 may break records, in the U.S., for lowest vote turnout in the modern age.

Oh Canada

Blame Canada's youth for crappy voter turnout.  Or blame TV.

A story on a study (different story on same study here) found less attachment to political parties and less a sense of civic duty when it comes to voting as key for youth -- that and watching news on TV.

They also found that “there is … no clear evidence that the decline in youth turnout can be imputed to changes in the electoral context. The most plausible hypothesis is therefore that youth turnout is declining because of changes that have occurred among young citizens.”

But what young Canadians know, that does matter.  As the story notes:

However, knowledge of the political scene in Canada was a strong determining factor in youth voting. Ninety per cent of youth voters who were able to correctly answer all three survey questions “used to assess political knowledge” actually voted, versus 24 per cent of youth who couldn’t answer any of them.

I'm a bit late getting to this one, but it's a report of an interesting study (abstract here) that finds:

Low-income youth are more apt to vote if they are involved in political activism, according to a new study that also notes the influence of friends and family.

This is a fairly understudied population -- hard to reach, hard to get to participate, and often with less political power (thus, less interest in those who pay for surveys and other forms of research).  

Political Knowledge and Voting

Without further comment on a busy day, I point at this entry in the continuing debate over who should vote and whether a knowledge test makes sense.

What People Know isn'tas Important as We Thought

An article in the Spring 2011 Public Opinion Quarterly includes an article with a title sure to grab my attention: Rethinking the Role of Political Information (pdf of full article here).

Why did it grab my attention?  First off, I don't want to have to rethink anything.  How dare the journal and the author suggest I do so.  And yet here it is, POQ, saying I should.  Of course anything with political information dovetails nicely with what I scribble about here, so I skim academic journals for blogging material (because, let's face it, no real person with a life is going to bother doing this). 

Reasons enough, and yet here's the kicker for me -- it's a study that challenges the conventional wisdom.  Not challenge in an earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting kind of way, but the author (Matthew Levendusky at Penn) does suggest, based on his analyses, we give too much credence to the power of what people know.  He does a nice job of discussing how much political information matters, or we think it matters, while managing to appropriately not cite me at all (grrr, c'mon guy, I need the social sciences citation hits).  In an analysis that gets a wee bit more complicated than I want to wrestle with here, he finds support for his notion that previous studies overstate the relationship between political information and political behaviors such as voting and participation.  Or, as he put it, "the effects of general political information are much smaller than previous estimates suggest, thereby opening up the possibility that other factors and other kinds of information ... matter to voters."   

In a large part, this matters mostly to those who do academic research in which political knowledge is a control variable in predicting political behaviors.  In a small part it suggests something more and something deeper, that perhaps what people know -- always thought to be vital in a democracy -- perhaps doesn't matter as much as we thought, and that the costs of improving political knowledge in the electorate will provide us few gained benefits in other behaviors, like voting and participation. That's a little depressing.

Should 16 and 17 year olds vote?

The title above says it all.  Should they be able to vote?  This piece by Daniel Hart and Robert Atkins argues that these teenagers below 18 are capable of voting.  From the abstract:

Analyses of national survey data demonstrate that by 16 years of age—but not before— American adolescents manifest levels of development in each quality of citizenship that are approximately the same as those apparent in young American adults who are allowed to vote. 

As the father of two bright and annoying teens, a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old, I can buy into this. Unfortunately, I can't access the full article and judge the reasoning as well as I'd like, such as comparisons of political sophistication by age.  Then again, given the infamous lack of political knowledge found in general among the electorate, my hunch is dropping the age of voting could only improve matters.  Or at least not hurt.

How to Become an Informed Voter

I apologize in advance for this video's bad advertising, bad music, and I really apologize for the fact it has John Stossel as host.  But it's about voting, it's about being an informed voter, thus I feel slightly obligated to provide it for your viewing (dis)pleasure.

See below.

Efficacy and Voting

I blogged yesterday (or see below) about a study from American Behavioral Scientist that examines the role of efficacy and confidence of one's knowledge -- especially among young voters -- and voting.  In that post I broke down the methodology and touched on key concepts.  Today I sum up the results and ask about their meaningfulness in real-world politics.

Basically it goes like this: younger voters are less confident of their political knowledge, of their competence to vote.  This affects their likelihood to vote.  The results in this study are a bit slim, more tantalizing than conclusive.  And the role of media is unclear in this study.

But it makes sense that younger voters might be less confidence in their electoral competence.  They tend to consume less news and to not have built up a foundation of political knowledge from previous elections and campaigns.  That, along with other factors, suggests lower voting.

So what do we do?  Build up their confidence?

No.

We have enough of this self-esteem crap in schools, especially among kids who don't have all that much to be "esteemed" about.  If young people fill up on empty-calorie content such as The Daily Show without also consuming serious news, then they're likely to feel like they have a base of knowledge from which to vote but instead have little actual knowledge.  You might increase voting, but you might also increase "bad" voting.  I'm not sure how much a democracy gains, though I suppose indifferent or inconsistent voting beats no voting at all.

What People ... Spit?

According to this study:

"The results show that male Barack Obama voters (winners) had stable post-outcome testosterone levels, whereas testosterone levels dropped in male John McCain and Robert Barr voters (losers). There were no significant effects in female voters."

Provided, without comment, because I honestly don't know what to say.

News in English and Spanish

I am fiddling with data to study Latino use of news and whether it predicts turnout in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. 

The dependent variable is simple: did you register to vote, and did you actually vote?  These are self reports, fairly straightforward.

I have lots of predictor variables because there are competing theories about which model best explains participation, but these theories fail to include news media consumption.  That got me curious, then I became more so when I turned to the question of whether individuals prefer their news in English or in Spanish.

On one hand, I suspect a preference for news in English will signal integration (aculturation) into U.S. society, so you'd have greater likelihood to vote.  On the other hand, perhaps news in Spanish would be associated with greater voting as it eases the cost of getting such motivating information.

Which one?  Dunno yet.  Still wrestling with theory, but an early peak of the data suggests the former, not the latter.

Possible confounds?  Here's a few -- how long they've lived in the U.S. (if not born in U.S.), how comfortable they are with English, how much attention they pay to news from another country (Mexico, etc.),   Gotta not only control for these, have to examine how they interact with my key independent variable (language preference for news) in explaining my key dependent variable (voting).

There's a lot more to this, of course.  The literature is broad and deep, some of it specifically at Latino/Hispanic voting, a lot of it aimed at other groups, all of it rich in theoretical debate.  Is the SES model enough?  Or is a better model one that focuses on ties to the local U.S. community?  And so on and so on. 

While I work in political participation research and the role of news consumption, this one swerves a bit outside my comfort zone.  That makes it fun.

Voting and Knowledge Down Under

Australia has compulsory voting, but fewer than 60% of 18 year olds are actually enrolled to vote. In a move that turns political participation and knowledge slightly on its head, the idea here is that by getting young people to vote, they'll learn more about politics. It's "Enroll to Vote" week. A story discusses the problem and the week and raises some interesting chick-and-egg questions about what people know versus participation in the political process.

The report recommended taking school elections more seriously, encouraging parents to engage young people in the political process, and focusing more attention on creating interesting politics and government subjects in schools.

This is an age-old discussion in the U.S. as well, especially with No Child Left Untested. Math and reading are vital, but falling out of curricula throughout the U.S. are those old civics classes, the ones designed to teach students not only the basics of government but -- more important -- why it matters. I'm Just a Bill on Capital Hill, sadly gone -- yet it still lives on YouTube. Too bad it doesn't live in classrooms any more.

But on a more serious note, the idea that forced participation will lead to greater knowledge -- there is some theoretical support for this. Tentative, more theoretical than perhaps practical, but I suspect in reality some aspect of forced voting will lead to an increase in knowledge. Modest, perhaps, but let's face it, compulsory voting kinda misses the point of participating in a democratic process. Maybe for some, not voting is a form of protest (though that's lazy thinking and often someone trying to sound smarter than they really are).

Newspapers and Political Engagement

Excellent blog today by Alan Mutter about a case study of what happens when a city loses a daily newspaper. The gist? Political engagement (voting) decreases. A PDF of the study is here. An important part of what people know, or in this case, what they no longer get to know because of a daily paper going away.

Should Kids Vote?

No, really. Stop giggling. It's a legitimate question, one that even had a journal article based on the premise.

I said stop giggling.

The author of the article in the International Journal of Children's Rights wrote:

"If democracy works well with a large number of adult voters with little or no knowledge of politics, it should also work with children voting."

As the father of two teenagers, two really smart teenagers, I have to say this idea deserves to be immediately trampled, squashed, spindled and mutilated. And then I'd do bad things to it, like make it watch American Idol.

But let's think about the basic idea, which seems to be that young people probably don't know a lot less than their adult counterparts. The fallacy here is that political knowledge is a valid measurement of the right to vote. Those days are long gone, at least in the U.S. Poll taxes and tests to cast your ballot are a thing of the Jim Crow South, not today. It's not political knowledge that is of issue here, nor even political competence (lots of numbskulls prove their numbskullery by voting opposite of me), but rather its a matter of combining experience and competence and knowledge and all the other things that go into play.

I'm not saying many adults who do vote have a clue, but we do not want to double or triple the number of uninformed voters by letting 16 year olds get in the ballot box and start pushing buttons, thinking it's an Xbox or way to access MySpace.

Spatial Violators

While the idea of spatial violation has a certain appeal, this research article is about people who tend to vote for candidates who, logically, they shouldn't vote for.

Huh?

Lemme explain. You ask folks in a survey to rank candidates on a bunch of issues, then you ask people where they stand on the same issues. Logically, people should vote for the candidate who looks more or less like them on those issues. And most people do exactly that. But between 1972 and 2004, the range of "spatial violators" fell between 9% and 15% in the presidential election years.

Education is a key factor. Less-educated respondents tended to be violators as compared to those with greater education. Falls into the ideological and partisan consistency, or you can easily explain this through various persuasion paradigms, such as the elaboration likelihood model. Then again, ELM explains everything!, or it seems that way sometimes.

No real media aspect to this study, though I can think up lots of different and interesting ways to integrate media consumption patterns into the likelihood of being a violator, or not. News media consumption might cut both ways. High consumption could arguably lead to less consistency as people pick up on other traits or factors that sway their vote, or high consumption could reinforce ideological or partisan cues that lead to greater consistency. It's a neat question. Time to grab some NES data and crank up the SPSS...

Youth, Knowledge, and Turnout

Voter turnout among young people has increased dramatically this campaign season, no doubt in part to Obama's candidacy and his theme of change. He appeal skews younger, more upper class, than does Clinton. That'll be the stuff of future political science journal articles, but here I'm more interested in the relationship between turnout and knowledge.

Younger people tend to score less well on tests of public affairs knowledge. The Pew Center documents this fully. Scroll down and you'll see only 15% of those ages 18-29 are categorized as "high" in knowledge. Ages 50-64 do a helluva lot better, scoring at 47%.

A doctoral student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill says: so what?

In a column published April 18 in the News & Observer, Justin Martin argues that the kind of knowledge tapped in these questions. Rather, he says "Young Americans are actually quite informed about issues that matter to them."

The Pew questions focus on who is president of Russia and whether Chief Justice John Roberts is conservative and a host of other points. As Martin argues:

Knowing who is the president of Russia or which party controls the House isn't a prerequisite of political participation. Many young people aren't interested in Russia, or in the bipolar nature of our two-party system.

....

Do not despair. Waves of youthful ignorance aren't going to wash down the democratic lighthouse. Quite the opposite. As young people choose what issues are important to them in the information age, we're seeing democracy become more precise, for citizens can easily acquire knowledge of issues they care about and specify the reasons they want to be part of democracy.

I kinda agree and sympathize with is position. He quotes Doris Graber, who along with V.O. Key are political scientists who argue that the people are not the dolts some make them out to be. But you'd hope that young people could at least do better than older respondents on at least some of the questions that do not involve American Idol, like how many troops are in Iraq, how many have died, or what's the difference between Sunni and Shia. This is not textbook civics, this is real world stuff. And it matters.

Back to my opening, about youth turnout. Most of that is powered by 18-29 year olds with a college degree or in college. Indeed, 79% of Super Tuesday young people attended or are attending college. No doubt the Obama effect again, but also hopes that a younger electorate might also be a better informed electorate.

We can only hope.