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As the old saw has it, 90 percent of politics is just showing up. Which is fine for people who are already engaged in the political system and expect to influence it. What about everyone else? The U.S. has millions and millions of people who typically do not vote or participate in politics. Is there a way into political life for those who are normally disconnected from it?
This is a topic MIT political scientist Ariel White has been studying closely over the last decade. White conducts careful empirical research on typically overlooked subjects, such as the relationship between incarceration and political participation; the way people interact with government administrators; and how a variety of factors, from media coverage to income inequality, influence engagement with politics.
While the media heavily cover the views of frequent voters in certain areas, there is very little attention paid to citizens who do not vote regularly but could. To grasp U.S. politics, it might help us to better understand such people.
“I think there is a much broader story to be told here,” says White, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science.
Study by study, her research has been telling that story. Even short, misdemeanor-linked jail terms, White has found, reduce the likelihood that people will vote — and lower the propensity of family members to vote as well. When people are convicted of felonies, they often lose their right to vote, but they also vote at low rates when eligible. Other studies by White also suggest that an 8 percent minimum wage increase leads to an increase in turnout of about one-third of 1 percent, and that those receiving public benefits are far less likely to vote than those who do not.
These issues are often viewed in partisan terms, although the reality, White thinks, is considerably more complex. When evaluating infrequent or disconnected voters, we do not know enough to make assumptions about these matters.
“Getting people with past criminal convictions registered and voting, when they are eligible, is not a surefire partisan advantage for anybody,” White says. “There’s a lot of heterogeneity in this group, which is not what people assume. Legislators tend to treat this as a partisan issue, but at the mass public level you see less polarization, and more people are willing to support a path for others back into daily life.”
Experiences matter
White grew up near Rochester, New York, and majored in economics and government at Cornell University. She says that initially she never considered entering academia, and tried her hand at a few jobs after graduation. One of them, working as an Americorps-funded paralegal in a legal services office, had a lasting influence; she started thinking more about the nature of government-citizen interactions in these settings.
“It really stuck in my mind the way people’s experiences, one-on-one with a person who is representing government, when trying to get benefits, really shapes people’s views about how government is going to operate and see them, and what they can expect from the state,” White says. “People’s experiences with government matter for what they do politically.”
Before long, White was accepted into the doctoral program at Harvard University, where she earned an MA in 2012 and her PhD in 2016. White then joined the MIT faculty, also in 2016, and has 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 voting information to people of apparently different ethnicities. It won an award from the American Political Science Association. (Nathan is now also a faculty member at MIT.)
Since then, White has published a string of papers examining how many factors interact with voting propensities. In one study focused in Pennsylvania, she found that public benefits recipients made up 20 percent of eligible voters in 2020 but just 12 percent of those who voted. When examining the criminal justice system, White has found that even short-term jail time leads to a turnout drop of several percentage points among the incarcerated. Family members of those serving even short jail sentences are less likely to vote in the near term too, although their participation rebounds over time.
“People don’t often think of incarceration as a thing they connect with politics,” White says. “Descriptively, with many people who have had the experience of incarceration or criminal convictions, or who are living in families or neighborhoods with a lot of it, we don’t see a lot of political action, and we see low levels of voting. Given how widespread incarceration is in the U.S., it seems like one of the most common and impactful things the government can do. But for a long time it was left to sociology to study.”
How to reach people?
Having determined that citizens are less likely to vote in many circumstances, White’s research is now evolving toward a related question: What are the most viable ways of changing that? To be sure, nothing is likely to create a tsunami of new voters. Even where people convicted of felonies can vote from prison, she found in still another study, they do so at single-digit rates. People who are used to not voting are not going to start voting at high rates, on aggregate.
Still, this fall, White led a new field experiment about getting unregistered voters to both register and vote. In this case, she and some colleagues created a study designed to see if friends of unregistered voters might be especially able to get their networks to join the voter rolls. The results are still under review. But for White, it is a new area where many kinds of experiments and studies seem possible.
“Political science in general and the world of actual practicing political campaigns knows an awful lot about how to get registered voters to turn out to vote,” White says. “There’s so much work on get-out-the-vote activities, mailers and calls and texts. We know way, way less about the 1-in-4 or so eligible voters who are simply not registered at all, and are in a very real sense invisible in the political landscape. Overwhelmingly, the people I’m curious about fall into that category.”
It is also a subject that she hopes will sustain the interest of her students. White’s classes tend to be filled by students with many different registered majors but an abiding interest in civic life. White wants them to come away with a more informed sense of their civic landscape, as well as new tools for conducting clean empirical studies. And, who knows? Like White herself, some of her students may end up making a career out of political engagement, even if they don’t know it yet.
“I really like working with MIT students,” White says. “I do hope my students gain some key understandings about what we know about political life, and how we can know about it, which I think are likely to be helpful to them in a variety of realms. My hope is they take a fundamental understanding of social science research, and some big questions, and some big concepts, out into the world.”
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