College Attendance Increases Young Voter Turnout, Two-Panel Study Shows

Why This Question Matters

Political scientists have long argued that higher education helps sustain democracy by producing more engaged citizens. Recent causal studies, however, have cast doubt on whether going to college actually raises political participation, reporting estimates with large statistical uncertainty. Andreas Videbæk Jensen revisits this debate to clarify whether the civic returns to college are real or a result of underpowered research designs.

What Jensen Asks

Does attending college cause young people in the United States to turn out at higher rates in elections, or have previous null results simply reflected low statistical power and uncertainty?

How the Study Was Done

• The paper reassesses prior effect estimates and argues that many published results are statistically imprecise and therefore compatible with either a null effect or a positive effect.
• Jensen then analyzes two-panel datasets of approximately 10,000 young U.S. voters using a well-powered difference-in-differences research design to estimate the causal effect of college attendance on turnout.

Key Findings

• Attending college leads to a substantive increase in voter turnout among young people in the United States.
• These results are consistent with the positive—but previously statistically uncertain—estimates found in earlier natural-experiment studies, suggesting those studies may have lacked the power to detect an effect reliably.

Why This Changes How Researchers Should Think About Education and Democracy

The study implies that statistical uncertainty in earlier work may have obscured meaningful civic returns to college. For scholars and policymakers, the findings argue for taking seriously the possibility that higher education increases political participation and for designing future studies with sufficient power to detect substantively important effects.