How does higher education impact voter turnout? Although the advent of innovative new methods has reignited the scholarly debate over whether education is a cause for voting or merely a proxy for other factors, little progress has been made in identifying the causal mechanism that supposedly explains the observed correlation between the two. In this paper, we develop three competing theoretical arguments that link higher education to voting based on its curriculum, type (university vs. polytechnic school) and teaching method. Using a new longitudinal survey of 2472 Finnish undergraduates who enrolled in the year 2012, we employ advanced sample design based GLM-estimation methods to test our models on voting likelihood in the 2014 European Elections, while controlling for alternative explanations including the students' SES and early-life socialisation processes. The results of our empirical analysis have important consequences for understanding the causal relationship between education and voter turnout.
