As the old saw goes, 90 percent of politics is just showing up. Which is great for people already engaged in the political system and hoping to influence it. And everyone? The United States has millions and millions of people who generally do not vote or participate in politics. Is there access to political life for those who are normally disconnected from it?
It’s a topic that MIT political scientist Ariel White has studied closely over the past decade. White conducts careful empirical research on typically neglected topics, such as the relationship between incarceration and political participation; how people interact with government administrators; and how various factors, from media coverage to income inequality, influence political engagement.
While the media extensively covers the opinions of frequent voters in some areas, very little attention is paid to citizens who do not vote regularly but might do so. Understanding American politics might help us better understand these people.
“I think there’s a much bigger story to tell here,” says White, an associate professor in MIT’s political science department.
Study after study of his research tells this story. According to White, even short misdemeanor prison sentences reduce the likelihood that people will vote – and also decrease the propensity of family members to vote. When people are convicted of crimes, they often lose their right to vote, but they also vote at low rates when they are eligible. Other studies by White also suggest that an 8 percent increase in the minimum wage leads to an increase in turnout of about a third of 1 percent, and that those who receive public benefits are much less likely to vote than those who do not.
These issues are often viewed in partisan terms, although the reality, according to White, is considerably more complex. When we assess infrequent or disconnected voters, we don’t know enough to make assumptions about these questions.
“Making sure that people with criminal histories are registered and able to vote, when they are eligible, is not a surefire partisan advantage for anyone,” White says. “There is a lot of heterogeneity in this group, which is not what people think. Lawmakers tend to treat this as a partisan issue, but at the general public level, there is less polarization and more people willing to support bringing others back into everyday life.
Experiences matter
White grew up near Rochester, New York, and majored in economics and government at Cornell University. She says she initially never considered entering academia and tried her hand at a few jobs after graduation. One, working as an Americorps-funded paralegal in a legal services office, had a lasting influence; she began to think more about the nature of interactions between government and citizens in these contexts.
“It really stuck with me how people’s experiences, one-on-one with someone who represents the government, when they’re trying to get benefits, actually shape their point of view. view of how government is going to work and see them, and what they can do. what is expected of the state,” White says. “People’s experiences with government matter to what they do politically.”
Shortly thereafter, White was accepted into the doctoral program at Harvard University, where she earned a master’s degree in 2012 and a doctorate in 2016. White then joined the faculty at MIT, also in 2016, and remained at the Institute ever since.
White’s first published paper, in 2015, co-authored with Julie Faller and Noah Nathan, found that government officials tended to have different levels of responsiveness when providing election information to people of seemingly different ethnic backgrounds. . He won an award from the American Political Science Association. (Nathan is now also a faculty member at MIT.)
Since then, White has published a series of articles examining how numerous factors interact with voting propensities. In a study in Pennsylvania, she found that public benefit recipients made up 20% of eligible voters in 2020, but only 12% of those who cast ballots. Looking at the criminal justice system, White found that even a short prison sentence results in participation declines of several percentage points among the incarcerated. Family members of people serving even short prison sentences are also less likely to vote in the short term, even if their turnout rebounds over time.
“People don’t often think of incarceration as having to do with politics,” White says. “Descriptively, with many people who have had experience with incarceration or criminal convictions, or who live in families or neighborhoods where this is common, we don’t see a lot of political action and we see low voting levels. Given the scale of incarceration in the United States, this appears to be one of the most common and effective measures the government can take. But for a long time, it was sociology to study.”
How to reach people?
Having determined that citizens are less likely to vote in many circumstances, White’s research now moves toward a related question: What are the most viable ways to change this? Certainly, nothing is likely to create a tsunami of new voters. Even where people convicted of misdemeanors can vote from prison, she found in another study, they do so at a single-digit rate. People who have a history of not voting are not going to start voting at a high rate, overall.
Yet this fall, White conducted a new field experiment to get unregistered voters to register and vote. In this case, she and some of her colleagues conducted a study to determine whether friends of unregistered voters might be particularly able to get their networks to register to vote. The results are still under review. But for White, this is a new field in which many types of experiments and studies seem possible.
“Political science in general and the world of political campaigns know an awful lot about how to get registered voters to vote,” White says. “There is so much work on get-out-the-vote activities, letters, calls and texts. We know much less about the roughly one in four eligible voters who are simply not registered at all and who are, in a very real sense, invisible in the political landscape. The vast majority of people I’m interested in fall into this category.
It’s also a topic she hopes will pique the interest of her students. White’s classes tend to be filled with students with many different majors but a consistent interest in civic life. White wants them to come away with a more informed idea of their civic landscape, as well as new tools for conducting their own empirical studies. And who knows? Like White herself, some of her students could end up making careers out of their political involvement, even if they don’t know it yet.
“I really enjoy working with MIT students,” White says. “I hope my students will gain key insights into what and how we know about politics, which I think will be useful to them in a variety of areas. I hope they will bring to the world a fundamental understanding of social science research, as well as some big questions and big concepts.