As the old saw says, 90 percent of politics is just showing up. This is fine for people who are already involved in the political system and expect to influence it. What about others? There are millions of people in the United States who do not normally vote or participate in politics. Is there a path to political life for people who are usually cut off from political life?
This is a topic that MIT political scientist Ariel White has studied closely over the past decade. White conducts careful empirical research on often overlooked topics, such as the relationship between incarceration and political participation. How people interact with government administrators. And how a variety of factors, from media coverage to income inequality, influence engagement with politics.
While the media gives a lot of attention to the opinions of those who vote frequently in certain regions, little attention is paid to those who do not vote regularly but are able to do so. Understanding U.S. politics may help you better understand such people.
“I think there’s a broader story being told here,” says White, an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Study after study, her research speaks for itself. White found that even short sentences associated with misdemeanors reduce people’s likelihood of voting and reduce the propensity of their family members to vote. People often lose their right to vote after being convicted of a felony, but they may also vote at lower turnout rates if they are eligible. White’s other research shows that an 8% increase in the minimum wage increases turnout by about a third of 1%, with people receiving public benefits far more likely to vote than those without. It has also been suggested that the
While these issues are often viewed from a partisan perspective, White believes the reality is much more complex. When evaluating infrequent or nonvoting voters, we don’t know enough about these issues to make assumptions.
“Registering people with past convictions and having them vote when they’re eligible is definitely not a partisan advantage for anyone,” White said. “There’s a lot of heterogeneity in this group, but it’s not what people assume. Lawmakers tend to treat this as a partisan issue, but at the public level we don’t see as much polarization.” , more and more people are willing to help others get back to normal life.”
experience is important
White grew up near Rochester, New York, and majored in economics and government at Cornell University. She says she didn’t initially think about going to university and tried a few jobs after graduating. One of them worked as a paralegal in a law firm funded by the U.S. military and had a lasting impact. She began thinking more about the nature of government-citizen interactions in these situations.
“When trying to get benefits, people’s experience of meeting one-on-one with the people who represent the government helps people understand how the government operates, how to view it, and what it can do. It really struck a chord with me that it’s really shaping the way we look at the state,” White said. “Experience with government matters in what people do politically.”
Eventually, White was accepted into Harvard University’s doctoral program, earning a master’s degree in 2012 and a doctorate in 2016. He then joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also in 2016, and has remained at the institute ever since.
White’s first paper in 2015, co-authored with Julie Farrar and Noah Nathan, found that government officials tend to have different levels of responsiveness when providing voting information to people of distinctly different ethnicities. It turns out that there is something. He received an award from the American Political Science Association. (Nathan is also currently a faculty member at MIT.)
Since then, White has published a series of papers examining how many factors influence voting trends. One study focused on Pennsylvania and found that recipients of public benefits made up 20 percent of voters in 2020, but only 12 percent of them voted. In researching the criminal justice system, White found that even short sentences reduce voter turnout by several percentage points while incarcerated. Family members of people who serve even short sentences are also less likely to vote in the short term, but participation picks up over time.
“People don’t really associate incarceration with politics,” White said. “Specifically, many people have been incarcerated or convicted, or live in families or neighborhoods that have been imprisoned or convicted, so they are less likely to be politically active and have low voter turnout.” I get it. Given how widespread incarceration is in the United States, this seems like one of the most common and impactful things the government can do. But for a long time, research has turned to sociology. It was entrusted to me.”
How do we reach people?
White’s research, which determined that people are unlikely to vote in many situations, is now expanding to related questions. “What is the most viable way to change the situation?” Certainly, there is nothing that can trigger a tsunami of new voters. Yet another study found that even when people convicted of felonies were able to vote from prison, their turnout was in the single digits. People who are accustomed to not voting are unlikely to start voting at a generally high rate.
Still, this fall, White led a new field experiment that forced unregistered voters to both register and vote. In this case, she and several colleagues created a study aimed at seeing whether friends of unregistered voters could specifically enlist their networks on the voter rolls. Results are still under review. But for White, it’s a new area where different kinds of experiments and research seem possible.
“Political science in general and the political world in practice knows an awful lot about how to get registered voters to come vote,” White says. “There’s so much work going on – get-out-the-vote campaigns, mailers, phone calls, text messages. I know very little about about one in four voters, and overwhelmingly the people I’m interested in fall into that category.”
It’s also a subject she hopes to keep her students interested in. White’s classes tend to be filled with students who enroll in a variety of majors but have an abiding interest in civic life. White hopes they will have a more informed sense of the civic landscape and new tools to conduct clean empirical research. And who knows? Like White herself, some of her students may end up making careers out of political engagement, even if they don’t realize it yet.
“I really love working with MIT students,” White says. “I hope my students gain an important understanding of what we know about political life and how we can know it, which I think will be useful in a variety of areas. ”My hope is that they have a basic understanding of social science research and that they bring some big questions and some big concepts to the world. ”