The Slippery Young Voter - Defining the Young Voter and Why it Matters

• In Event: Poster Session: Elections and Voting Behavior

Abstract

Across the academic and practitioner literature, there is no agreed upon age range for “young voters.” While the Census defines “young voters” as 18-29 year olds, our analysis of over 60 peer-reviewed articles that use the term finds over 20 different age-range variations, and another 20 articles with no stated age range. Using a mixed method approach, this paper seeks to define the term “young voter,” analyze the way young voters are framed in previous research, and determine if the selection of “young voter” age range impacts the outcome of previous research.

First, we explore the impact of varied age ranges on voting and research outcomes. Using verified voting data from the CCES from 2006 through 2018, we demonstrate the implications of using the widest, narrowest, and most common age ranges in the “young voter” literature on measuring turnout within the group. These results show a substantial difference in turnout depending whether young voters are defined as college-aged, 18-29, or below 40 years old. We then perform a meta-analysis of prior studies to demonstrate how the selection of age range impacts statistical significance and effect size in studies.

We subsequently conduct a qualitative thematic analysis of prior research on young voters and demonstrate that this work centers on the notion that young voters do not vote or vote at low rates. Other common themes include the start-up costs to being civically engaged, the transience and mobility of young voters, stages of life, socioeconomic status, and peer contact. The second most common theme found was the use of the Internet by young people and its impact on political participation. Closely related to this theme was the role of digital content creation and news use in young voter education, participation, and turnout.

This paper contributes to the corpus of research surrounding young voters by highlighting the lack of specificity around the term “young voter,” and demonstrates the impact on scholarship based on how researchers choose to define this cohort. The results and methods used should allow future research to work from a shared definition of the “young voter.”

Authors

• Kassie Phebillo, University of Texas at Austin

• Jay T. Jennings, University of Texas-Austin

• Katherine Haenschen, Northeastern University