Dinners for Democracy!

An Issue-Based Approach to Peer-to-Peer Student Voter Education

One barrier that we know gets in the way of student turnout in local elections: the connection between the issues students care about and the down-ballot offices that affect them aren’t always clear. It is not always obvious to students how their vote matters in local races. One potential answer to this issue is Dinners for Democracy.

Dinners for Democracy are nonpartisan, student-led workshops on different topics that students care about intended to build attendees’ knowledge in three areas: general knowledge about the issue, connections between that issue and their down-ballot vote, and the mechanics of the voting process.

In concert with Turn Up Turnout’s leadership team, University of Michigan students developed workshops on issues that interest them, including renewable energy policy, racial justice and the judicial system, and the redistricting process in Michigan. Each presentation included research-based information on a single issue, an explainer on the relevant elected and appointed offices, and a crash course on voting procedures in Michigan. Once these presentations were vetted for accuracy and nonpartisanship, students signed up to attend the dinners and fill out a survey evaluating their baseline knowledge on the topic. After the hour-long workshop, attendees filled out another survey to establish if their knowledge increased (and to sign up for a gift card we send them as thanks for their participation). After 10-18 weeks, students who signed up to attend the dinners received a follow-up survey to see if they retained knowledge from the dinners.

We asked attendees to answer five questions in each of the three areas we were interested in measuring: issue knowledge, connections between the issue and local offices, and the mechanics of voting. Our results show that students are learning from these events, especially in the issue knowledge and issue connection areas. For example, students answered 76% of issue knowledge questions correctly immediately following the dinners, compared to 55% before the dinners. Attendees had a high baseline of knowledge about the mechanics of the voting process in Michigan so there was not as robust of a gain in knowledge in that area. Students largely seem to retain the information they learned at the workshops, particularly when it comes to connecting the issue to local offices, although we hasten to add that this is an ongoing project, and our findings are preliminary.

This grant-funded project is an active and on-going initiative that will continue through the November 2022 election, and we hope that our evaluation of the resulting data will show if this is a promising pathway to increase student civic knowledge and engagement!

To learn more check out https://govote.umich.edu/tut

Phoebe Henninger is a PhD Candidate studying American Politics at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include election administration, election law, political participation, and survey design. Phoebe attended the Community College of Philadelphia before earning her B.A. in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018.

Logan T. Woods is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan focusing on American Politics. His research interests include political parties, election administration, voter behavior, and political psychology. His dissertation explores how people react when parties and elections fail at being mechanisms for representation. Since 2018, he has worked with Turn Up Turnout to increase student civic engagement at the University of Michigan. He has a B.A. in American History and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Illinois Springfield.