The Indebted Citizen: Student Debt as a Resource in Creating Young Voters

• In Event: Debt, Free College, Free Speech, & BLM: Topics in Higher Education Politics

Abstract

Young Adults have some of the lowest levels of voter turnout since the youth were given the right to vote in 1972. However, we have seen these groups turn out at higher rates in certain instances like when Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders ran for president, as well as in the 2018 midterm election.
While a variety of factors are sure to influence the ebbs and flows of youth political participation, one variable that has been understudied is an individual’s accumulation of student loan debt. As high student debt is a unique experience for the younger generations, it may have unique effects on their political inclinations ; how they choose, or choose not to, engage with political activities like voting, donating to campaigns, working for campaigns, putting up political signs, and attending local meetings. This study seeks to answer the question of what are the effects of student debt on the political participation habits of young adults?
Using the 2014-2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES, N≈200,000), this study examines the mobilizing effect of student debt on young adult's participation. Controlling for a host of alternative explanations, this study finds young adults with student debt are 9 percentage points more likely to be contacted by campaigns than those without debt, 5 points more likely to vote, and 4 points more likely to run for office. These effects decrease the age gap in voting by 31%, nearly eliminates the age gap in being contacted, and reverses the age gap in running for office. Last, though older voters with debt are less politically interested than older voters without student debt, young adults with debt are just as interested as older adults without debt, suggesting that debt compels younger voters to become more interested in politics . These results are confirmed through subsample models of Millennials, as well as only Millennials who went to college . Overall, these results strongly suggest that student debt has been a mobilizing force for young Americans.

Authors

• Courtney Juelich, University of Iowa

• Joseph Coll, University of Iowa