Schar School Research Project Explores How to Encourage Student Voting

Andrew J Schappert — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 15:51:03 +0000

Schar School Research Project Explores How to Encourage Student Voting Andrew J Schappert Thu, 10/17/2024 - 11:51

‘In Virginia, every year is an election year, since we have state elections in the off years, so it presents a wonderful opportunity every fall to run an election study.’

Turnout among younger voters is lower than for any other age group. In the 2020 election, which had an unusually high turnout among young people, just under half of eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 24 participated, compared to 63% of all eligible voters. Civic groups have launched digital mobilization campaigns, from texting to Instagram spots, targeted toward these younger voters.

According to Schar School of Policy and Government at ��AV associate professor Jennifer N. Victor, relying on electronic communication and social media is misguided. The most effective way to promote greater turnout in this group is by having students make personal appeals to other students directly, face to face. This is the finding of a research project called “You’re the Voter” that Victor conducted alongside doctoral candidate Tim Bynion and several undergraduate volunteers from the First-Year Democracy Lab residential learning community.

“I began this project as a way to engage students both in research—the ‘lab’ part of our name—and the political process—the ’democracy’ part,” said Victor. “In Virginia, every year is an election year, since we have state elections in the off years, so it presents a wonderful opportunity every fall to run an election study.”

Democracy Lab students live together on the Fairfax Campus, take class together, and visit area government institutions for tours and lectures. Victor recruited students for the project both from the Democracy Lab community and across the university to serve as Mason Voting Ambassadors.

Now in its third year, Victor has used the project to help her students better understand how to conduct social scientific research surrounding questions about elections and voting while also contributing to the scholarship on voter turnout and encouraging more young people to vote.

Under Victor’s direction, the research team has refined their methods each year in their search to discover the most effective way to encourage college students to vote. In the first year of the project, they administered a panel survey before the election, asking several students about their intention to vote. Survey respondents were then either sent an email with information about how to vote or were contacted by Democracy Lab students for a one-on-one meeting to provide guidance on how to vote. However, the team found problems with this approach. Responses to their post-election survey were disappointingly low, making it challenging to assess which communication strategy yielded greater results.

Arina van Breda, of the League of Women Voters of Fairfax, training Democracy Lab students on how to register voters in fall 2023. Photo provided

The following year, Victor switched to a field experiment approach in which they recruited faculty partners to engage their classes in the survey. Students either heard a brief presentation about voting during class or were sent an email with the same information, alongside a control group that received no voting information at all. Using a grant from the Students Learn Students Vote coalition, Victor purchased access to the Virginia Voter File, allowing the team to see which participants had voted. “In that experiment,” Victor said, “we found that peer-to-peer presentations moved the needle, making students 11% more likely to vote, whereas emails had the same impact as absolutely no contact at all.”

According to Victor, this demonstrates that there is a trade-off between cost and efficacy in encouraging voter turnout among young voters. Digital communications might be cheaper and reach more potential voters, but are ultimately of little, if any, effect. In contrast, sending out volunteers to have face-to-face discussions with potential voters, especially peer-to-peer, while more costly and time-consuming, achieves far greater results. This means that effective voter engagement, unfortunately, cannot be scaled up without significant expense, a finding that comports with the existing literature about voter engagement more generally.

“Voting ambassadors—students talking to students—work best,” said Arina van Breda, director of voter registration for the Fairfax, Virginia, League of Women Voters (LWV). “My group’s volunteers are mostly older women with clipboards, and when it looks like a group of mothers standing around campus, we don’t make much progress in getting students to respond to us. That’s why we love partnering with Professor Victor and her students.”

Students in the Schar School’s First-Year Democracy Lab assisted with a research project to find the most effective way to promote voter turnout among young people.

LWV leaders train George Mason students not only in the rules surrounding voter registration, but also in the challenges college students might face in registering to vote.

“It’s fun watching the students become effective advocates for voting,” van Breda said. “Information is power, and once they have the training, you can see the confidence they exude in getting their peers active in voting as well.”

“College students often have very different situations that affect how they vote” said Victor, “so you can’t just stand in front of a group and say, ‘Here's what you do.’”

Many students are first-time voters and are unsure of how to register; others are unsure if they should vote at home or on campus. Since universities draw students from all over the country, and the laws governing absentee ballots differ from state to state, it’s difficult to offer generalized information to a large group.

“And so, when there is no one single set of instructions to give all students, it's really helpful to sit and have a conversation with individual voters, figure out what their situation is, what their goals are, and help them figure out the best plan for their own voting,” Victor said.

“Being able to practice public speaking, participate in civic engagement, and work on something I'm passionate about has made for one of the best college experiences I've had so far,” said government and international politics major Maxwell Castner, one of the undergraduates who worked on the project.

Bynion, a doctoral candidate in political science, was equally enthusiastic about the project, explaining that “we learn about experiments and the methodology behind them in our doctoral training, but working with Dr. Victor to create and implement a project like this was invaluable in building my research skills. I feel much more prepared to conduct this kind of research in the future.”

This year’s project, “The Choice is Yours,” is focused primarily on civic engagement in the next few months, more than research design.

“After two years of focusing on teaching how to conduct a social science research project, this year our attention is on activating the campus community,” Bynion said. “Given the high interest in the presidential election, we want to direct our energy to voter turnout, putting our research findings into action.”

In addition to their partnership with LWV, the Democracy Lab is engaging other campus groups in voter turnout efforts including student government, campus housing, and George Mason’s Office of Community Engagement and Civic Learning.

LWV’s van Breda explains why outreach like this is so important: “If a young voter’s first registration experience is a negative one, they may never try again. One bad interaction may turn them into a lifetime nonvoter. They will be affected most by the policies that are created now, so it’s essential that they register and vote at a rate that reflects their longer future as citizens.”

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University Professor Faye S. Taxman Earns Additional $16.5 Million Grant

Andrew J Schappert — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 17:32:12 +0000

University Professor Faye S. Taxman Earns Additional $16.5 Million Grant Andrew J Schappert Wed, 09/04/2024 - 13:32

The National Institutes of Health awarded another $16.5 million to the Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN), led by ��AV Professor Faye S. Taxman. Taxman directs the Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence! within the Schar School of Policy and Government and spearheaded the establishment of JCOIN in 2018 to improve the treatment of opioid use disorders. This additional funding will allow the research network to expand its focus beyond opioids to substance abuse disorders more generally.

Faye S. Taxman. Photo by Office of University Branding

Comprising 12 research hubs and two resource centers, JCOIN promotes research into the treatment and management of opioid use disorder, particularly in individuals within the justice system. Taxman explains that, while each research hub has its own studies, her Coordination and Translation Center (CTC) works to “translate what we know works best, according to science, to targeted audiences that can implement them.”

Since its inception in 2018, the JCOIN team has worked alongside a variety of stakeholders including health care professionals, social workers, and police officers, as well as county jails, probation agencies, and judicial courts. By disseminating new research findings and identifying best practices, Taxman’s team bridges the gap between scholarship and practical application, strengthening the positive impact of the research that JCOIN produces and maximizing the value of the taxpayer funding the network receives.

Engaging stakeholders in the process of translating scientific research has helped “generate new ideas about topics we need to research, and issues that we need to develop new materials for, to really advance the field,” and even, “opened our eyes to new barriers that we hadn’t even thought about,” Taxman said, including the social stigma surrounding professionals who work in this field.

With this newest round of funding, JCOIN is rebranding itself as the Justice Community Overdose Innovation Network, reflecting the expanding scope of its research and dissemination efforts.

“Over 130,000 people [across the United States and Canada] die each year due to overdoses,” Taxman said, “and overdoses are one the highest categories—even more than gun violence—for fatalities in our country; it cuts across all socioeconomic statuses.”

Substance abuse is a national epidemic “that affects everyone in our society. You usually can’t find anyone that doesn’t know someone who has had an alcohol or substance use disorder,” she said.

By connecting empirical research in partnership with practitioners in the field, JCOIN is ideally situated to alleviate the problems of addiction and substance abuse that plague communities across the United States.