Schar School Research Project Explores How to Encourage Student Voting

Turnout among younger voters is lower than for any other age group. In the 2020 election, which had an unusually high turnout among young people, just under half of eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 24 participated, compared to 63% of all eligible voters. Civic groups have launched digital mobilization campaigns, from texting to Instagram spots, targeted toward these younger voters.  

According to Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University associate professor Jennifer N. Victor, relying on electronic communication and social media is misguided. The most effective way to promote greater turnout in this group is by having students make personal appeals to other students directly, face to face. This is the finding of a research project called “You’re the Voter” that Victor conducted alongside doctoral candidate Tim Bynion and several undergraduate volunteers from the First-Year Democracy Lab residential learning community.

Democracy Lab students live together on the Fairfax Campus, take class together, and visit area government institutions for tours and lectures. Victor recruited students for the project both from the Democracy Lab community and across the university to serve as Mason Voting Ambassadors.

Now in its third year, Victor has used the project to help her students better understand how to conduct social scientific research surrounding questions about elections and voting while also contributing to the scholarship on voter turnout and encouraging more young people to vote.

Under Victor’s direction, the research team has refined their methods each year in their search to discover the most effective way to encourage college students to vote. In the first year of the project, they administered a panel survey before the election, asking several students about their intention to vote. Survey respondents were then either sent an email with information about how to vote or were contacted by Democracy Lab students for a one-on-one meeting to provide guidance on how to vote. However, the team found problems with this approach. Responses to their post-election survey were disappointingly low, making it challenging to assess which communication strategy yielded greater results.

The following year, Victor switched to a field experiment approach in which they recruited faculty partners to engage their classes in the survey. Students either heard a brief presentation about voting during class or were sent an email with the same information, alongside a control group that received no voting information at all. Using a grant from the Students Learn Students Vote coalition, Victor purchased access to the Virginia Voter File, allowing the team to see which participants had voted. “In that experiment,” Victor said, “we found that peer-to-peer presentations moved the needle, making students 11% more likely to vote, whereas emails had the same impact as absolutely no contact at all.”

According to Victor, this demonstrates that there is a trade-off between cost and efficacy in encouraging voter turnout among young voters. Digital communications might be cheaper and reach more potential voters, but are ultimately of little, if any, effect. In contrast, sending out volunteers to have face-to-face discussions with potential voters, especially peer-to-peer, while more costly and time-consuming, achieves far greater results. This means that effective voter engagement, unfortunately, cannot be scaled up without significant expense, a finding that comports with the existing literature about voter engagement more generally.

“Voting ambassadors—students talking to students—work best,” said Arina van Breda, director of voter registration for the Fairfax, Virginia, League of Women Voters (LWV). “My group’s volunteers are mostly older women with clipboards, and when it looks like a group of mothers standing around campus, we don’t make much progress in getting students to respond to us. That’s why we love partnering with Professor Victor and her students.”

LWV leaders train George Mason students not only in the rules surrounding voter registration, but also in the challenges college students might face in registering to vote.

“It’s fun watching the students become effective advocates for voting,” van Breda said. “Information is power, and once they have the training, you can see the confidence they exude in getting their peers active in voting as well.”

“College students often have very different situations that affect how they vote” said Victor, “so you can’t just stand in front of a group and say, ‘Here's what you do.’”

Many students are first-time voters and are unsure of how to register; others are unsure if they should vote at home or on campus. Since universities draw students from all over the country, and the laws governing absentee ballots differ from state to state, it’s difficult to offer generalized information to a large group.

“And so, when there is no one single set of instructions to give all students, it's really helpful to sit and have a conversation with individual voters, figure out what their situation is, what their goals are, and help them figure out the best plan for their own voting,” Victor said.

“Being able to practice public speaking, participate in civic engagement, and work on something I'm passionate about has made for one of the best college experiences I've had so far,” said government and international politics major Maxwell Castner, one of the undergraduates who worked on the project.

Bynion, a doctoral candidate in political science, was equally enthusiastic about the project, explaining that “we learn about experiments and the methodology behind them in our doctoral training, but working with Dr. Victor to create and implement a project like this was invaluable in building my research skills. I feel much more prepared to conduct this kind of research in the future.”

This year’s project, “The Choice is Yours,” is focused primarily on civic engagement in the next few months, more than research design.

“After two years of focusing on teaching how to conduct a social science research project, this year our attention is on activating the campus community,” Bynion said. “Given the high interest in the presidential election, we want to direct our energy to voter turnout, putting our research findings into action.”

In addition to their partnership with LWV, the Democracy Lab is engaging other campus groups in voter turnout efforts including student government, campus housing, and George Mason’s Office of Community Engagement and Civic Learning.

LWV’s van Breda explains why outreach like this is so important: “If a young voter’s first registration experience is a negative one, they may never try again. One bad interaction may turn them into a lifetime nonvoter. They will be affected most by the policies that are created now, so it’s essential that they register and vote at a rate that reflects their longer future as citizens.”