IZA DP No. 6539 Schooling and Voter Turnout: Is there an American Exception? Arnaud Chevalier Orla Doyle May 2012 DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit Institute for the Study of Labor Schooling and Voter Turnout: Is there an American Exception? Arnaud Chevalier Royal Holloway, University of London, CEE and IZA Orla Doyle Geary Institute, University College Dublin Discussion Paper No. 6539 May 2012 IZA P.O. Box 7240 53072 Bonn Germany Phone: +49-228-3894-0 Fax: +49-228-3894-180 E-mail: [email protected] Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. IZA Discussion Paper No. 6539 May 2012 ABSTRACT Schooling and Voter Turnout: Is there an American Exception?* One of the most consistent findings in studies of electoral behaviour is that individuals with higher education have a greater propensity to vote. The nature of this relationship is much debated, with US studies generally finding evidence of a causal relationship, while European studies generally reporting no causal effect. To assess whether the US is an exception we rely on an international dataset incorporating 38 countries, the ISSP (International Social Survey Programme) from 1985 to 2010. Both instrumental variable and multi-level modelling approaches reveal that the US is an outlier regarding the relationship between education and voter turnout. Moreover, country-specific institutional and economic factors do not explain the heterogeneity in the relationship of interest. Alternatively, we show that disenfranchisement laws in the U.S. mediate the effect of education on voter turnout, such that the education gradient in voting is greater in U.S. States with the harshest disenfranchisement legislature. As such, the observed relationship between education and voting is partly driven by the effect of education on crime. JEL Classification: D72, I20, K42 Keywords: voter turnout, education, disenfranchisement laws Corresponding author: Arnaud Chevalier Department of Economics Royal Holloway, University of London Egham, TW20 0EX United Kingdom E-mail: [email protected] * This research was funded by the European Science Foundation’s Human Values, Institutions and Behaviour (HumVIB) program “Cross-national and Multi-level Analysis of Human Values, Institutions and Behaviour”. Research assistance kindly provided by Keith O’Hara and Gerard Victory. ISSP data was made available from the GESIS data Archive (http://zacat.gesis.org). CPS State level data was obtained from IPUMS. We also thank Phil Oreopoulos for kindly providing the information on school reforms in the US. We also thank Tarja Viitanen and seminar participants at SFI, Copenhagen for their comments. 1. Introduction There is a broad consensus in the political and economic literature that education is positively correlated with a range of civic and pro-social behaviours (Putnam, 2000). More specifically, a host of studies find that education is positively associated with voter turnout1 (Campbell,Converse, Stokes and Miller, 1960; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995; Rosenstone and Hansen 1993). The tenets of this relationship was formalised in the modernization hypothesis, with Lipset (1959, p79) stating that “education presumably broadens men’s outlooks, enables them to understand the need for norms of tolerance, restrains them from adhering to extremist and monistic doctrines and increases their capacity to make rational electoral choices”2. The relationship between education and civic behaviour is usually advocated as a positive return to education. Indeed, “[this relationship] provides some of the most important justifications for government intervention in the market for education” (Dee, 2004). However, the relationship between education and political behaviour may be spurious, and driven by unobserved characteristics correlated both with educational attainment and voter turnout. U.S. studies (Sondheimer and Green, 2010; Dee, 2004; Milligan, Moreti, and Oreopoulos, 2004) generally support the modernisation hypothesis and continue to identify a positive relationship between education and turnout. On the 1 Indeed the relationship between education and turnout, which was first identified in the 1920’s (Merrian and Gosnell, 1924), transcends election type e.g. transnational, national or regional elections, and form of data collection e.g. self reported or administrative data. 2 At the macro level, proponents of the modernist theory argue that education is a contributor to democratisation (Huntington, 1991), yet the empirical evidence is still controversial. Studies by Barro (1999) and Glaeser, Ponzetto, and Shleifer (2007) using cross country panel evidence were dismissed by Acemoglu,Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2005) as not robust to specification changes. However, new evidence by Bobba and Coviello (2007) and Castello-Climent (2008) using a GMM estimator report positive and statistically significant effects of education on democracy. 2 contrary, most analyses using Western European data find that the impact of education on voter turnout disappears when correcting for endogeneity bias (Siedler, 2010, Pelkonen, 2010; Borgonovi, d’Hombres, and Hoskins, 2010)3. Whether this difference represents genuine differences in the relationship between education and voting in the U.S. and Europe, or are due to data or methodology differences, is the first question of interest in this study4. To address this question, we use comparable data from 38 countries by pooling 25 waves of the International Social Science Program (1985-2009) data. We adopt an Instrumental Variable (IV) strategy to deal with the potential endogeneity of education using changes in the minimum school leaving age (SLA) as an instrument. We find that the causal relationship is only present in samples which include the U.S., thus suggesting that the U.S. is an exception. A multi-level analysis also confirms that the U.S. is an outlier. Secondly, we assess the potential drivers of this country heterogeneity. We find that the random slope coefficient is a function of regime duration, time since last election, whether voting is compulsory and to some extent ease of voters’ registration. However, none of these factors explain the American exception. Our third contribution is to assess the role of the judicial system in the U.S. in mediating the relationship between education and voter turnout. The U.S. incarcerates a larger fraction of its population than most countries and most States to some extent 3 Similarly, Devereux and Hart (2010) note that U.S. studies relying on changes in school leaving age to identify causal effect of education tend to report large positive financial returns to education, while European-based studies estimate, at most, low financial returns. 4 Other cross country comparisons include Milligan et al. (2004) who provide results for the U.S., Canada and the U.K., however they use separate dataset for each country, and only identify a positive effect in the U.S. In addition, Borgonovi et al., (2010) uses the European Social Survey and thus is not informative on whether the relationship differs between Europe and the U.S. 3 disenfranchise felons and ex-felons. As more educated individuals are less likely to be convicted, and thus lose their voting rights, we investigate whether the relationship between education and voting observed in the U.S. is driven by disenfranchisement laws. Using State-level data on voter turnout for the period 1988-2010, we report that indeed the education gradient on voting is greater in States with the harshest disenfranchisement laws. Thus, disenfranchisement laws rather than the modernisation theory, may explain the positive relationship between education and voting. This has important consequences on the computation of the social returns to education. The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 describes related literature on the potential mediators of the relationship between education and turnout and discusses the U.S. and European studies which attempt to test the causal hypothesis. Section 3 and 4 present the data and methodology respectively. Section 5 presents the results of the various analyses. Finally, section 6 concludes. 2. Related Literature Multiple causal mechanisms have been proposed to account for the relationship between education and political behaviour. Education improves general knowledge and cognitive skills which may facilitate a better understanding of the political