Young Citizens’ Civic Engagement and Civic Attitudes: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis

Voting Age, Information Experiments, and Political Engagement: Evidence from a General Election

“…Prior studies rely on data from surveys with low response rates, raising the possibility that only the most engaged respond, suppressing variation and making eligibility effects harder to identify. For example, response rates were 8.5 and 15 percent in the surveys used by Horiuchi, et al (2021) and Holbein and Rangel (2020); our own follow-up email survey also had about an 8.5 percent response rate.…”

“…To raise the response rate, this non-incentivized survey consisted of only two questions aimed at finding out if respondents had watched the last presidential debate. The 442 responses to this questionnaire yield a response rate similar to that of Horiuchi, et al (2021).…”

“…Results from prior research are also consistent with the hierarchy of relevance that emerges in these findings. Prior work finds that just-eligible respondents exhibit more general political interest and engage in more political discussions with others and that the differences are moderately robust (Horiuchi, Katsumata, andWoodard 2021, Scartascini andVlaicu 2018). At the other end of the salience spectrum, however, prior research yields little systematic evidence of eligibility effects on political knowledge.…”

“…Prior research examining whether eligibility increases political engagement has focused on mature democracies. Horiuchi, Katsumata, and Woodard (2021) use Japan's age restriction for automatic voter registration in a sharp regression discontinuity framework and find that just-eligible respondents are somewhat more likely to seek election-relevant information, but the estimates cannot identify any impact on specific activities undertaken to acquire information. 2 Holbein and Rangel (2020) find no effects of eligibility on political engagement for American respondents.…”

“…Relative to prior research, the Mexican electoral context offers a more straightforward setting to identify the intrinsic motivations of eligible voters to engage politically. In Japan, for example, as Horiuchi, Katsumata, and Woodard (2021) explain, upon becoming eligible to vote Japanese citizens are also automatically registered to vote and informed through a government letter about the logistics of voting. This lowers the costs of political engagement but may also stymie self-motivation, which is one of the main arguments the authors use to explain their limited findings.…”