The 2023 State of the Student Vote Workshop
Join us in Chicago on April 12 for the 2023 State of the Student Workshop. The only way to reach 100% student voting is to double down on the progress we made together in our 1st year.
Why host another research workshop?
In April 2022, we launched the Student Vote Research Network with an incredible virtual workshop that featured some of the most cutting edge research and innovation happening at the forefront of the movement for 100% student voting.
Since then, guided by the leadership of a Steering Committee with robust representation from both academic and community perspectives, we’ve cultivated a strong and growing network of nearly 400 scholars and practitioners all bringing unique perspectives, experiences, and tools to the work of figuring out how to reach 100% student voting. We published research summaries to build shared knowledge about academic findings. We curated quarterly "State of the Student Vote” reports to give scholars easy access to progress happening in the movement and the research questions practitioners are most interested in. We funded five important original research projects led by scholars all across the country that were fielded during the 2022 elections. Every single day, new social and intellectual connections are being made in the Student Vote Research Network. Some of these connections help us make important marginal progress. Others hold the promise of breakthrough innovation and discovery. ALL are necessary to get to 100% student voting.
Now it’s time to double down on that progress. It’s time to bring leaders in our network together to share research results, understand each other’s perspectives, and lean in to the hard work of figuring out how to reach 100% student voting together.
Join us in Chicago on April 12!
We are delighted to share that we will be hosting the 2023 SVRN Workshop as a working group event at the 2023 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA). We will meet in the historic Palmer House Hotel, in the Indiana Room, from 1-5pm. You can RVSP here, including requesting travel support. Preference for that funding will be given to emerging scholars and students and to participants coming from minority-serving institutions and community colleges.
What we learned together in 2022
Last year, the Student Vote Research Network distributed grants to five academic teams to support their research on increasing nonpartisan civic learning, political engagement, and voter participation among college students. During the first of half of the 2023 SVRN State of the Student Vote Workshop, we will discuss presentations about the results emerging from all of these projects.
Dr. Sabrina Tyuse and Dr. Leah Sweetman from Saint Louis University will share their work on helping students at three urban institutions overcome barriers to voter registration and participation.
Dr. Brian F. Harrison, Jahnavi Rao, and Sydney Fahn will share what they’ve learned about bolstering voter identity and confidence, with a focus on students at minority-serving institutions (MSIs) and community colleges.
Dr. Amber Wichowsky and Savannah Charles at Marquette University will share findings on how “dialogue dinners” with first-year students increase turnout and civic engagement.
Dr. Lara Rusch from the University of Michigan-Dearborn will share her focus group data from UMD and a local community college, exploring the experiences of commuting students in their communities and on their campuses.
Dr. Crystal Harris will explore the impact of pedagogical strategies and course content on the engagement of first-year students at her MSI, Governors State University.
A team of scholars (Me, Dr. Stephanie L. Demora, Dr. Jasmine Jackson, Dr. Maricruz Osorio, Sarah Hayes, Jazmn Jimenez, Kesicia Dickinson, and India Lenear) will share their focus group data on how college students act as knowledge brokers, bringing home to their families and communities the information they receive at school about elections and how to vote.
What are we going to learn together in 2023?
After we hear and discuss brief reports about these six research projects, participants at the 2023 SVRN Workshop will explore opportunities to continue building deep partnerships between scholars and community partners to answer the three core questions that we are pursuing as a network. The second half of the 2023 State of the Student Vote Workshop will feature three sessions co-facilitated by community partners and scholars. These sessions will focus on how we can deepen our partnerships by generating research and synthesizing results in ways that are useful for movement strategy related to the SVRN priority questions.
How do we strengthen local leadership committed to 100% student voter participation at every college and university? This conversation, led by teams at the ALL IN Challenge and p3 Research Lab, will focus on how we explore questions related to identifying, inspiring, and supporting local commitments to 100% student voting in campus communities. We will build on our SVRN discussions over the last year about the correlations between local action planning and voter turnout, when local action planning for 100% student voting is effective, and the strategies that inspire effective action planning. The session will give an update on exciting opportunities to use natural language processing to analyze action plans and explore other ways to work together to figure out what strategies cultivate commitments to 100% student voting.
How do we identify and implement the most impactful tactics for mobilizing and educating student voters? This conversation, led by the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition and my colleagues on Team Michelson, will focus on tactical innovation moving us towards 100% student voting. While there is a robust literature of experimental findings overall, as my colleague Dr. Elizabeth Bennion and I outline in a forthcoming article in the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science there are very few studies about tactics specifically geared to the unique elements of student voter mobilization. With this session we will build on the discussions we have had in the SVRN over the last year about learning management system integrations, the new Ask Every Student toolkit, and the best strategies no one is studying as well as our pre-2022 election SVRN consensus statement on the Top 3 Things Every Higher Education Leader Should Do Before Election Day that was published in the Washington Post. We have an amazing agenda sketched out for this session including learning from the exciting work happening around campus media at VoteAmerica and figuring out how to build the deeper partnerships between scholars and local campus vote coalitions needed to study classroom and campus-based tactics more thoroughly.
How does everyone else, especially local election officials and other policy makers, help local campus leaders succeed in reaching 100% student voting? Our third afternoon session, led by the teams at the Campus Vote Project and University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, will focus on the cultural and policy contexts that make 100% student voting possible. Inspired by the work of Charles Stewart III and the Conference on Election Science Reform and Administration, we worked over the past year to better understand how research on election policies and administration applies to student populations. This work included the extraordinary work Campus Vote Project did in the 2022 Democracy’s Future Report to track state voting policies that impact youth voting rights, our SVRN research summaries on state voter registration policies, online voter education by local election officials, and direct mail outreach from state election officials to young voters as well as our thorough original analysis of new federal and state policies related to student voting in SVRN’s Summer 2022 State of the Student Vote Report. This session will focus on building our understanding of how voting policies affect students and expanding SVRN’s work to explore how other civil society actors - such as sports teams, musicians, businesses, and other cultural leaders - can best create contexts where 100% student voting becomes possible.
Why do we care about 100% student voting?
In closing out the 2023 State of the Student Vote Workshop, we will touch on some deeper questions about why we want to reach 100% student voting. To what extent is working toward 100% student voting an effective strategy for building inclusive political climates and cultures on our campuses and in our nation? Are we helping to create a world where everyone is able to participate fully? Many scholars and partners in our network are working on critically important issues related to campus climate and national civic resilience. We hope our 2023 State of the Student Workshop can be a jumping off point to deepen these conversations.
The Upshot? Join us!
We are making incredible progress together as a network. Now is the time to take that work to the next level. The 2023 State of the Student Vote Workshop is an opportunity to do just that. If you can make it to Chicago on April 12, we’d love to host you and help you find the best way to bring your knowledge and expertise to the work of figuring out how to achieve 100% student voting. If you can’t make it to Chicago on April 12, consider this email an open invitation to find your place in the Student Vote Research Network over the course of the next year. It’s going to take ALL of us—including you—to figure out this puzzle. Please reach out to me or any member of our steering committee to share your ideas and suggestions for how to continue making great progress together in the year to come.
Click here to RSVP for the 2023 State of the Student Vote Workshop.
Melissa R. Michelson is Dean of Arts & Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Menlo College. She also serves as Chair of the Student Vote Research Network Steering Committee.