Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 28, 2001

Volume 30, Number 4

Grant supports professors' study
of dwindling voter turnout

Yale professors Donald Green and Alan Gerber have received a grant of $570,000 from the Pew Charitable Trusts to continue their groundbreaking study of voter turnout among American youth.

The grant will allow a research team led by Green and Gerber at Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) to build on their study of the effectiveness of a massive voter registration drive on college campuses during the last national election campaign.

There has been a 5%-8% decline in voter turnout in national elections among 18- to 24-year-olds since 1972, according to Green, who is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Political Science as well as the director of ISPS. In the 1982 congressional elections, 24.8% of eligible voters in that age group cast their ballots, but only 16.6% did so in the 1998 elections.

"The rate at which young citizens vote in the United States has fallen to the lowest level in a half century," Green says.

To gain insight on how to reverse this trend, researchers from Yale conducted random field experiments following the Youthvote 2000 drive at four campuses: Boulder, Colorado; Stony Brook and Albany in New York; and Eugene, Oregon.

Students who had been registered to vote through the efforts of Youthvote 2000 were divided randomly into "treatment" and "control" groups by the ISPS team. Those in the treatment group were reminded through follow-up phone conversations or face-to-face visits to go to the polls, while no one from the control group was contacted at all. Yale researchers compared the turnout rates of both groups by examining public records of who actually voted.

Follow-up phone calls, the researchers found, raised the turnout rate by five percentage points over that of the control group, while face-to-face contact yielded an 8.5 percentage point advantage. Green points out that those findings are based on the most conservative interpretation of the data they collected.

"What we found," he says, "is that the old-fashioned voter mobilization drive has a dramatic effect on voter turnout. This refutes the pessimistic view that nothing can be done to raise the low turnout levels of young voters, a view that often causes political campaigns to focus their mobilization efforts on other groups."

Yale researchers will use some of their funding from Pew to examine the efficacy of civic programs in public schools to boost voter participation. They will also extend their study to the state and municipal elections of 2001 and 2002. Last, they will reach beyond college campuses to gain a wider socioeconomic sampling of the nation's youth.

-- By Dorie Baker

T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

Yale will proceed with Tercentennial celebration

Peabody's insects inspire fascination in scholars far and near

Talk by philanthropist surgeon to open United Way appeal

Service of Remembrance

J. Lloyd Suttle is appointed deputy provost

Benefit concert to help families of tragedy's fallen

Convocation to celebrate Yale's long tradition of theological education . . .

Grant supports professors' study of dwindling voter turnout

Panelists share experiences on matters of gender

Famed Bolshoi Theatre ballerina describes a life devoted to dance

Forest management certification program is launched

Students win grants for environmental research around the world

Insects are special of the day on Peabody Museum menu

Remembering the struggle

Trumbull Lecture will examine 1828 treatise on liberal education

Employee Day at the Bowl

Campus Notes