"Data-Driven Strategies to Promote Youth Turnout."

research conference

August 29, 2018

In 2018, Edie Goldenberg of the University of Michigan organized and hosted a workshop at MIT, with help from Adam Berinsky and Charles Stewart and with support from the Mellon Foundation. Multiple teams of scholars shared papers summarizing research on student voting.

• David Nickerson and Elizabeth Bennion summarized what experimental research on voter turnout tells us about what might work (personal contact! text message reminders! pledging and planning to vote!) for students.

• Mike Hanmer and Jared McDonald synthesized what we know about how structural barriers to participation might affect students and cautioned us against putting too much hope in administrative solutions when trying to fix the cultural and behavioral problem of low voting rates.

• John Holbein and Sunshine Hillygus shared some of the findings from their book Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes to Civic Action and emphasized the role that colleges and universities can play in helping students follow through on their intention to participate in democracy.