Empowering the next generation: The role of direct democracy in youth enfranchisement

Anna Maria Koukal, Patricia Schafer and Reiner Eichenberger

European Journal of Political Economy, 2024, vol. 81, issue C

Abstract: When are voters willing to enfranchise a new group? In this paper, we analyze whether and how the extent of direct democracy affects the willingness of the electorate to extend suffrage to young people. We exploit a new municipality-level dataset from two Swiss federal referendums that concerned lowering the voting age from 20 to 18. Based on a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) design, we demonstrate that support for lowering the voting age is lower within the context of direct democracy but that the negative effect disappears and even becomes positive if the youth population is already enfranchised at the local level at the time of the federal vote. This finding is consistent with the interpretation that voters react systematically to the expected power loss resulting from suffrage extensions, which is larger under a direct-democratic setting. However, once the new group is enfranchised on the local level, direct democracy can foster contact between the old and new electorate and can increase support for further suffrage extensions. In addition, we provide evidence of socio-demographic factors that affect the electorate’s willingness to lower the voting age.

Keywords: Voting age; Youth enfranchisement; Suffrage extension; Direct democracy; Power loss; Preference heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 D72 J15 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268024000090
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:81:y:2024:i:c:s0176268024000090

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102507

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().