When we ask good questions we get good partners
A 2018 workshop on student voting at MIT generated unique research partnerships and community knowledge. The Student Vote Research Network will build on that!
Dear Friends,
On the journey to 100% voter turnout, there is no wrong place to get started. Anything we do to make our democracy more inclusive, even for just one voter, moves us closer to our goal. But the journey is too big to take on all at once. We each must choose a place to begin.
Student voting is a particularly strategic place to focus. When we talk about broad demographic groups, such as young voters, it can be unclear how to get started. But when we start the conversation with a focus specifically on student voting, the path is clear. Most college students go to one (and only one) higher education institution. Each institution has an obligation to help all their students vote—a responsibility recently emphasized by the Biden administration. The Student Vote Research Network aims to support those campus efforts focus on students, providing the knowledge, tools, and support these institutions need to fulfill their obligation to our democracy.
In 2018, with support from the Mellon Foundation, I made an important strategic decision to focus on student voters at a research workshop I organized at MIT. Adam Berinsky and Charles Stewart helped pull the meeting together. While a conversation about student voters is adjacent to the many ongoing investigations into young voters, it is different in several important ways.
Second, focusing on student voters excludes more than half of 18 - 24 year olds who are not in college or graduate school.
So why focus on student voting? Because of the partners it brings into the conversations! Specifically, the educators and institutional leaders at the 4,000 degree granting institutions in America who have both a legal and educational (and some would say moral) obligation to support 100% of their eligible students in voting.
That’s a big job and in 2018 at MIT leading political scientists from around the country got us started.
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.
But more importantly, we’re going to build on the extraordinary promise of that workshop by building a dynamic learning community with the local partners who are making immediate use of the knowledge we generate about how to achieve 100% student voting.
I hope you’ll check out some of the papers linked in this post and start thinking of your own ideas for how we keep building knowledge together. By focusing specifically on student voting—and not just youth voting or other demographic categories—we expand the impact and reach of our work.
Best,
Edie Goldenberg