Alessia Russo, UiO: Youth Enfranchisement, Political Responsiveness, and Education Expenditure: Evidence from the U.S.

Staff lunch seminar. Alessia Russo is Assistant Professor at UiO. She will present the paper "Youth Enfranchisement, Political Responsiveness, and Education Expenditure: Evidence from the U.S.".

Alessia Russo. Photo: UiO.

Abstract:

This paper studies the effect of the introduction of preregistration laws, which allow young citizens to register before being eligible to vote, on voter turnout and public spending in the United States. Since preregistration laws have been introduced in different states in different years, these events have generated exogenous variation across space and time in the exposure of young voters to the new electoral reforms. Consistently with a political economic model, estimates exploiting a difference-in-difference regression design over U.S. state-level data establish that preregistration determines an increase in state government spending for higher education to the benefits of newly-enfranchised young voters. Results from a sample of higher education institutions also show a positive effect of preregistration on state grants and recipients of state-provided student financial aid. Our findings therefore suggest large political responsiveness of education spending to potential shifts in voter turnout for the young population.We also show that preregistration laws promote a sizeable de facto enfranchisement effect for young voters. The influence is stronger for poor young, who show a stronger response both at the political level, by increasing their voter participation, and at the economic level, by adapting their higher education enrolment decisions.

Published Mar. 11, 2016 9:44 AM - Last modified Jan. 6, 2017 7:46 AM