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The Stubborn Unresponsiveness of Youth Voter Turnout to Civic Education: Quasi-experimental Evidence from State-Mandated Civics Tests

Jilli Jung,
Maithreyi Gopalan

Youth voter turnout remains stubbornly low and unresponsive to civic education. Rigorous evaluations of the adoption of civic tests for high school graduation by some states on youth voter turnout remain limited. We estimate the impact of a recent, state-mandated civics test policy—the Civics Education Initiative (CEI)—on youth voter turnout by exploiting spatial and temporal variation in the adoption of CEI across states. Using nationally-representative data from the 1996-2020 Current Population Survey and a Difference-in-Differences analysis, we find that CEI does not significantly affect youth voter turnout. Our null results, largely insensitive to a variety of alternative specifications and robustness checks, provide evidence regarding the lack of efficacy of civic test policies when it comes to youth voter participation.

Keywords
youth voter turnout, civic education, quasi-experiment, difference-in-differences, fixed effects, civic engagement
Education level
K-12 Education
Topics
Policy, Politics, and Governance
Tags
Social studies education,
Returns to education and skills,
Efficacy
Download 11/2022
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/zaex-ab19
EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:
Jung, Jilli, and Maithreyi Gopalan. (). The Stubborn Unresponsiveness of Youth Voter Turnout to Civic Education: Quasi-experimental Evidence from State-Mandated Civics Tests. (EdWorkingPaper: -668). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/zaex-ab19

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