Actually, studies have shown More educated people are more likely to vote.
But how strong is the relationship between education and voter turnout, really? And what could be causing it?
“A reason for [providing] Public education is to create an educated citizen who can participate in the political process,” he says Jörg Spenkuchassociate professor of managerial economics and decision science at Kellogg. “But to what extent this is true — and then whether education makes people more likely to participate — that’s still an open question.”
To answer these questions, Spenkuch and colleagues, Ethan Kaplan of the University of Maryland and Cody Tuttle of the University of Texas at Austin, compared the voting habits of people whose birthdays fell just before the typical fall deadline for U.S. elementary school enrollment
The researchers’ analysis of census and voter registration data showed that there were indeed small but measurable differences in the overall level of education completed by these two groups of people—and in their likelihood to vote. On average, people born shortly before the cut-off date received more education and were more likely to vote.
Furthermore, they found that, for each additional year of education a person receives, the probability of voting increases by 3 percentage points.
“It was not previously known that people on either side of this [cutoff] The line goes to the polls at slightly different rates or has somewhat different partisan affiliations,” says Spenkuch. “These effects are not large, but they are clearly there.”
Natural experiment
To investigate how education changes a person’s political commitment, Spenkuch and his colleagues needed a way to track the future voting habits of a huge number of people who were nearly identical except for the total amount of education they received during their childhood and youth.
So the researchers used a quirk of the US education system to find their near-match populations. In many schools, a student must be five years old by September 1 to enroll in kindergarten. Therefore, a child born on 31 August will start primary education a year earlier than a child born on 2 September.
Using US census data, Spenkuch and his colleagues examined whether this cutoff effect led to long-term differences in the amount of education people receive—and whether this connection might be related to people’s future political habits.
By matching census information on education levels with administrative data on voter turnout and political party registration, Spenkuch and his colleagues were able to create a natural experiment comparing the political behavior of millions of people whose birthdays were close to the registration threshold.
“Our approach is very close to an idealized version of this research design, which is to compare people exactly on opposite sides of the line,” he says.
Additional education matters
First, the researchers wanted to confirm that people born before the due date do, in fact, go on to receive higher levels of education. Indeed, Spenkuch and his team found that these “early starters” went on to complete 0.034 more years of schooling on average than their counterparts during their educational careers. They also found that early starters were about 0.5 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school.
That doesn’t sound like much, but “another way to interpret it is that there is a small number of people—about three in a hundred—who complete an entire extra year of schooling by virtue of being born just a few days before, rather than after, the school entry cutoff,” Spenkuch explains.
And this tiny increase in overall education is significant in a sample of millions of people. “It’s part of the reason why having these huge datasets is so important,” he adds, “because only then can you really isolate the signal from the noise.”
The researchers then compared the two groups’ future levels of political engagement. Among people who became registered voters, starting school early increased their turnout by a quarter (0.25) of a percentage point. It also reduced their likelihood of registering as a Democrat or Republican by about 0.18 percentage points.
Essentially, starting school as one of the youngest in a class—and getting, on average, slightly more education over the next twelve years—resulted in more political engagement and less overt partisanship.
Quantity over quality
Spenkuch and his colleagues then analyzed the difference between the quantity and quality of education people received to better understand the forces driving the relationship between education and voting.
Consider two 50-year-olds who both finished college, but only one of them started early. The quality of the education levels of the two 50-year-olds could be considered about the same because they both earned a college degree. But when these two people were still in college, the exact difference in quantity between their educational achievements still played out. By age 20, early starters would be about a year ahead of their schooling.
By examining the differences in attendance rates among 19- to 21-year-olds on either side of the school entry restriction, the researchers were able to isolate how important the sheer amount of schooling was to an individual’s political activity.
“We show that each additional year of education increases voter turnout by about three percentage points,” says Spenkuch. “It’s a big result.” (For comparison, research showed that the introduction of television reduced voter turnout by less than two-tenths of a percentage point per year.)
The findings don’t necessarily close the book on the researchers’ original questions in one shot. But for Spenkuch, the implications of this research are clear.
“What it means is that providing people with more education makes them more likely to participate in the political process,” he says. “If you want to boil it down to the arguments for public education provision, it seems that more educated citizens are at least more engaged in politics. Hopefully, they’re also more competent.”
