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Voting at 16: Does lowering the voting age lead to more political engagement? Evidence from a quasi-experiment in the city of Ghent (Belgium)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2020

Dieter Stiers Open the ORCID record for Dieter Stiers [Opens in a new window] ,
Marc Hooghe  and
Ruth Dassonneville
Dieter Stiers*
Affiliation:
KU Leuven, Centre for Political Science Research, Leuven, Belgium KU Leuven, Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, Leuven, Belgium
Marc Hooghe
Affiliation:
KU Leuven, Centre for Political Science Research, Leuven, Belgium KU Leuven, Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, Leuven, Belgium
Ruth Dassonneville
Affiliation:
Département de science politique, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada
*
*Corresponding author. Email: dieter.stiers@kuleuven.be
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Abstract

While youth suffrage is widely debated, the causal effects of being eligible to vote on adolescents' political attitudes are less well known. To gain insights into this question, we leverage data from a real-life quasi-experiment of voting at 16 in the city of Ghent (Belgium). We compare the attitudes of adolescents that were entitled to vote with their peers that just fell below the age cut-off. We also examine the effects of the enfranchisement at 18-years-old. While we find an effect of youth enfranchisement on attention to politics, there is no evidence for an effect of enfranchisement on political engagement overall.

Keywords

Ghentpolitical interestregression discontinuity designvoting agevoting at 16youth enfranchisementyouth suffrage
Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 849 - 856
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2020

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