13:15 - 15:30
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Álvaro Canalejo-Molero
Discussant/s:
Jane Green
Meeting Room B

Marie-Lou Sohnius, Arndt Leininger, Thorsten Faas, Sigrid Roßteutscher, Armin Schäfer
Temporary Disenfranchisement: Negative Side-Effects of Lowering the Voting Age

Álvaro Canalejo-Molero
Does new party entry increase electoral turnout? Quasi-experimental evidence from the 2015 local Spanish elections

Alexander Held
The Electoral Consequences of Compulsory Voting: New Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Robert Liñeira, Pedro Riera
Why does proportional representation benefit left-wing parties?
Temporary Disenfranchisement: Negative Side-Effects of Lowering the Voting Age
Marie-Lou Sohnius 1, Arndt Leininger 2, Thorsten Faas 2, Sigrid Roßteutscher 3, Armin Schäfer 4
1 University of Mannheim
2 Freie Universität Berlin
3 Goethe University Frankfurt
4 University of Münster

While a growing body of literature is concerned with researching the opportunities, risks, and consequences of lowering the voting age, extant research has neglected the side-effects of an uncoordinated implementation within federal systems. Voting age reductions tend to be implemented in lower-level elections first. If, for instance, a state election with voting age 16 takes place less than two years before a national election with voting age 18, some underage voters eligible for the former will have no right to vote in the latter. Analyzing a panel survey of young citizens from Germany, we find that under-age voters who were eligible in a state election in May 2017 experienced a decrease in external efficacy and satisfaction with democracy after not being eligible to vote in the national election five months later. Even after regaining eligibility in another subsequent election, the net effect of temporary disenfranchisement on external efficacy remains negative.