The Effect of Co-Residence on Turnout

Recent scholarship has given renewed attention on the influence of social networks on voting. One avenue towards possible interpersonal influence is shared residency. Individuals sharing households may affect each others as they are directly confronted with each others’ decision to vote or not on Election Day. An important challenge when studying the influence of co-residency on turnout is sorting into households. Individuals decide to reside together based on a variety of factors, some of which are likely correlated with political engagement, making cross-section models of co-residency effects vulnerable to unobserved unit heterogeneity. In this study we try to estimate the causal effect of shared residency by exploiting information about when individuals in two person households moved in together. We compare the correlation in individual level turnout between household members in households which was established just before and just after the election. This allows us to largely avoid sorting effects and to separate the effects of co-residency per se from long-term socialization effects.