-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 1
1. Intro & Questions
The issue we plan on investigating is the lack of participation in elections and specifically compare voter participation among states and various age groups. We believe that everyone living in the states, such as taxpayers, are stakeholders in their democracy because whoever is elected will play a large role in laws and policies that may or may not be passed that can affect our daily lives. Specific direct stakeholders include voting citizens who have a direct involvement and impact on elections by voting, while indirect stakeholders include any person living in the United States, especially those that use government services, that do not vote. In addition, people that are apart of marginalized communities are heavily impacted because when these groups are underrepresented or don’t exercise their right to vote, people who are elected into office generally don’t have diverse opinions or backgrounds.
This is an issue because some people aren’t given the proper education on how important voting is whether it’s on the local, state, or federal level, because they may believe that their vote doesn’t count. It has been shown that socioeconomic factors are associated with whether or not people grow the habit of voting which can include younger people not willing to vote, cultural background, such as family members being citizens vs. naturalized, or even having family members incarcerated that no longer have a right to vote, which decreases the chance of family members voting. Overall when this happens, there is not a proper representation.
A strong and transparent democracy needs to have adequate participation from citizens. As a result, low voter participation hurts the citizenry because they are not able to gain full support from its citizens in terms of their decision making. When voters make their voices heard, there tends to be stronger support for government actions because voters have put in the time to elect someone on their platform. Especially for districts that have low voter participation, their incumbent may not accurately represent their interests and this can change greatly through greater participation.
We will take a look at voter participation rates for states to see how swing states compare to more partisan states and Washington counties to look at how age may be a factor in participation. If there are certain counties or areas that tend to have lower voter participation then campaigns would be able to use this information to reach more voters to convince them to vote. We want to essentially be able to identify geographical areas and age groups that we could potentially target with campaigns or other informational mediums so that they can vote and shape a more representative government-constituent relationship.
- How does the level of voter participation influence or even guarantee the selection of a candidate of some political party, especially in swing states?
- How does voter participation vary across different age groups?