Learn more about the barriers to voting on your campus
The Campus Vote Project Student Voting Study is an amazing opportunity to learn about the specific barriers keeping students at your campus from voting.
Why do voting rates vary so much at different colleges even when they serve similar student populations?
One of the most important strategies we have for surfacing insights about how to reach 100% student voting is also the most obvious and simple: asking our students what keeps them from voting. This kind of rich survey and interview data can help us understand the mechanisms that drive significant variation in student voting rates at different colleges and universities. That’s why the Campus Vote Project Research Collective has teamed up with Emily Sydnor at Southwestern University to establish the Student Voting Study. This study is an important tool that scholars, students, and local campus vote coalitions can use to better understand the unique barriers to student voting in specific communities and contribute to broader understanding of what it will take to reach 100% student voting nationwide.
How does the Student Voting Study work?
The Student Voting Study generates both shared insights across all campuses and unique insights for each participating campus with a simple design. The study includes a brief survey where student participants are asked to share their voter experiences and evaluate the impact of various factors on their likelihood to register and vote in previous elections. Participating campuses then receive their own copy of the Student Voting Survey via Qualtrics and have the opportunity to add campus-specific questions at the end of the survey. For participating campuses without Qualtrics licenses, Campus Vote Project has a limited number to distribute. Survey respondents can choose to participate in a follow-up interview with Campus Vote Project research staff focused on civic and political conversations, activities, and experiences among students. This design generates both survey and interview data. And that data can speak to both barriers shared across campuses and barriers that are unique to specific communities.
The Student Voting Study (Study ID #17017) received IRB exempt status from the University of Florida in January.
Sign up at this link to participate in the Student Voting Study at your campus!
You can learn more about the Student Voting Study and get involved by filling out this short google form:
The Student Voting Study builds on the incredible learning community we’ve been growing over the last year at the Campus Vote Project Research Collective. Drawing from Campus Vote Project’s network of over 200 Student Democracy Fellows and their faculty and staff mentors, the CVP Research Collective brings together researchers at all points in their careers in an environment that supports collaboration and mentorship. With a strong focus on supporting student research, the CVP Research Collective is bringing students into the study of student voting as both research subjects and knowledge producers. Examples of the work we’ve published so far includes Kamryn Yanchick’s study of Native student voting habits at the University of Oklahoma and Christina William’s study of the impact of state election laws at Clark Atlanta University. We meet regularly on zoom and at conferences - please get in touch if you want to be involved in this amazing community as either a student or a mentor!
How can more kinds of data support improved student voting strategy at your campus?
When we’re conducting research on how to achieve 100% student voting, we’re not only trying to make theoretical contributions to political science. We’re also trying to improve strategy and develop better practices for student voter engagement. And we’re trying to do that at both the local and national levels.
The Student Voting Study can make a valuable contribution to this work that complements existing resources. In recent years, campuses have been able to access dramatically improved individual level observational data about the voting behavior of their students thanks to the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education’s National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement. Giving campus vote coordinators data about how many and which students vote at their institution has enabled hundreds of institutions to make much more targeted and strategic action plans to move towards 100% student voting.
Adding rich survey and interview data from the Student Voting Study to your campus strategy process, alongside NSLVE reports, can help you improve your student voting action plan.
What does it look like to use your campus data from the Student Voting study to supplement your campus NSLVE report?
The University of Texas piloted a version of the Student Voting Study in 2020. The research team, led by Riley McKinzie, was able to synthesize learning from over 600 student responses alongside campus NSLVE data in a report on the “State of the Student Vote and Political Involvement at the University of Texas at Austin.” These data helped illuminate key mechanisms driving changes in student voting and political involvement at UT-Austin. Students were having more political conversations as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and January 6th but they felt increasingly siloed by political ideology because of the loss of informal gathering places while taking classes virtually. These insights informed UT’s 2022 student voting action plan which featured increased investment in cultivating partnerships with new academic departments and student organizations.
The upshot
The Student Voting Study is a powerful opportunity to learn more about barriers to voting on your campus and contribute to ongoing research around the country about to achieve 100% student voting.
We hope you’ll join!
Kassie Phebillo is Curriculum & Research Manager at the Campus Vote Project and a Communication Studies PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.
Marissa Farmer is National Research Intern at the Campus Vote Project and is a Political Science & Statistics Undergraduate Student at the University of Florida.