Reconsidering causal effects of voting with 16: shifting theory from eligibility to civic education

Electoral reforms, like reducing the voting age, are often accompanied by heated debates about what long-term effects they have on democratic processes, most prominently participation in elections. Recently, researchers have argued that the eligibility to vote during adolescence itself causes higher participation rates in future elections, compared to citizens who were not eligible to vote in their formative years. The argument is based on Plutzer’s habituation theory, stating that participation in one’s first elections significantly shapes future participation habits. Decreasing the voting age should have positive long-lasting effects on participation in future elections due to increased likelihood to vote among adolescents, who are embedded in a social context beneficial for their turnout (e.g., civic education in schools, living with one’s parents). Only few countries have implemented a voting age below the age of 18, therefore empirical evidence for the argument is still scarce. One exception is Austria, which reduced voting age to 16 in 2007 with adolescents being able to vote for the first time in national elections in 2008. We aim to investigate long-term causal effects to vote in the 2008 election on electoral participation in 2017 and 2019 national elections by focusing both on eligibility and political discussions. We use the AUTNES online panel study 2017-2019, which includes a retrospective assessment of voting behavior in 2013, 2017 and 2019. To examine the impact of eligibility we use a regression discontinuity design based on exact birth dates of participants to identify the causal effect of the eligibility to vote at 16. Specifically, we compare those who were just eligible to vote due to birth dates close to the cut-off with their counterparts who were just not eligible and therefore participated in their first national election only five years later with approximately 21 years. We did not find any significant long-term effects for voting in 2013, 2017 and 2019 national elections. Based on our null-findings, we second suggest to rethink the theoretical argument of the habituation theory and shift the theoretical focus from eligibility to civic education. We argue that it is not only the eligibility to vote per se that matters, but rather whether adolescents get involved into discussions about politics when being allowed to vote at the age of 16 or 17. Lowering the voting age might still have beneficial effects for turnout in the long run, but mainly for those students that discuss politics in class. While we observed a heightened frequency of political discussions at schools in recent generations, its relation with the long-term effects of lowering the voting age still need to be analyzed – also with regards to its effects on students who are not yet allowed to vote but are already benefiting from the political discussions held in class.