Practice Makes Voters? Effects of Student Mock Elections on Turnout

Richard Öhrvall () and Sven Oskarsson ()
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Sven Oskarsson: Uppsala University, Postal: and UCLS

No 1258, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: Student mock elections are carried out in schools around the world in an effort to increase political interest and efficacy among students. There is, however, a lack of research on whether mock elections in schools enhance voter turnout in real elections. In this paper, we examine whether the propensity to vote in Swedish elections is higher among young people who have previously experienced a student mock election. The analysis is based on unique administrative population-wide data on turnout in the Swedish 2010 parliamentary election and the 2009 European Parliament election. Our results show that having experienced a mock election as a student does not increase the likelihood of voting in subsequent real elections. This result holds when we study both short- and long-term effects, and when we divide our sample into different parts depending on their socio-economic status and study each part separately.

Keywords: Political inequality; Student mock elections; Voter turnout; Education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 D72 I24 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2018-12-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1258

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