Educating Students for Democracy: What Colleges Are Doing, How It’s Working, and What Needs to Happen Next.

Posted in CERL Research Reviews

Citation: Bennion, Elizabeth, A. & Melissa R. Michelson. 2023. “Educating Students for Democracy: What Colleges Are Doing, How It’s Working, and What Needs to Happen Next.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 705(1): 95-115. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162231188567.

Research Brief

The importance of increasing voter turnout and civic engagement has been a growing focus of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in recent years. Bennion and Michelson (2023) seek to provide an in-depth look into the research on the college student voting movement and strategies used to prepare students to be active citizens and increase civic identity. Universities and colleges in the United States are required by law to have voter registration activities on their campuses during election years but there are variations in the initiatives in which institutions take part. Due to the ever-changing media landscape, research in the area of mobilizing student voters needs to be ongoing with special attention paid to promoting civic engagement at minority-serving institutions (MSIs) that face additional challenges due to systemic racism (Bennion and Michelson 2023). Additional research needs to be conducted to fill literature gaps with high-quality studies examining the use of strategies and initiatives to promote civic engagement on college campuses. This article highlights the areas for growth in the field while also sharing the promising literature that has significant implications for higher education and political leaders.

Evidence-based research suggests the use of civic engagement initiatives can increase student voter registration and turnout. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) conducted by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education (IDHE) offers a substantial source of information about student voting. NSLVE provides its member schools with reports detailing their students’ voter registration and turnout. While this is a great tool for schools to track their progress there are limitations on how the data can be used by researchers since only some of the data is publicly available. ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge is a nonpartisan initiative that aims to increase civic engagement on college campuses through the sharing of NSLVE reports to be used by researchers and higher education leaders. The data from these reports suggests that schools that participated in ALL IN and other national organizations had higher student voter participation than schools that did not participate. Another effective strategy that has been found to increase student voter registration and turnout is personalized, face-to-face presentations in classrooms. One initiative that uses this approach is the Ask Every Student initiative where university employees are utilized to help educate students about the process of voting (Bennion and Michelson 2023). 

There are many strategies and theories to increase student voter turnout but many of them lack well-defined, empirical evidence. Bennion and Michelson (2023) reviewed additional strategies that were found to increase voter registration and turnout such as the use of digital civic engagement games, student-led efforts, and making voting more convenient (Young, Baum, and Prettyman 2021, Merivaki 2022, Bennion and Nikerson 2019). Communication methods such as email have been tested with mixed results, however, emails containing links to the voter registration portal have been shown to increase registration and voting for new voters (Bennion and Nikerson 2022). Additionally, texting registration reminders for people who have previously downloaded a registration form was found to increase registration (Kennedy and Mayorga 2008). The use of social media has been explored with promising implications with both student populations (Teresi and Michelson 2015) and non-student populations (Haenschen 2016). Findings from Teresi and Michelson (2015) suggest that personalized peer-to-peer social media interaction can have a positive effect on student turnout. Promising findings from qualitative research and case studies should be replicated to examine how utilizing Learning Management Systems (LMS), registration status communication, get-out-the-vote competitions, and the First-Time Voter Program can influence student turnout (Bennion and Michelson 2023).  

Bennion and Michelson (2023) call for further research on effective strategies to increase student voting and promote within students an intrinsic sense of responsibility to vote as engaged citizens. Educating students from a young age about the democratic process and why they specifically should be involved may help them become active citizens. Research suggests that civic engagement can be promoted early in an individual’s development through quality civic education curricula such as Project Citizen; this finding has been studied through research conducted by the Civic Education Research Lab (CERL) at Georgetown University (Owen and Iron-Groth 2024). The research conducted at CERL supports Bennion and Michelson’s (2023) desire to encourage students to become informed, active citizens. The authors advise college campuses to appoint a leader on campus for their student voting initiative, engage with a diverse group to promote these efforts, become a member school with NSLVE, and thoroughly plan how you will promote student civic engagement (Bennion and Michelson 2023). 

Naomi Rader, Research Specialist, CERL

References

Bennion, Elizabeth, and David Nickerson. 2019. What we know about how to mobilize college students to vote. APSA Preprints. doi:10.33774/apsa-2019-t0f6g.

Bennion, Elizabeth A., and David W. Nickerson. 2022. Decreasing hurdles and increasing registration rates: An online voter registration systems field experiment. Political Behavior 44:1337–58.

Bennion, Elizabeth, A. & Melissa R. Michelson. 2023. “Educating Students for Democracy: What Colleges Are Doing, How It’s Working, and What Needs to Happen Next.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 705(1): 95-115. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162231188567.

Haenschen, Katherine. 2016. Social pressure on social media: Using Facebook status updates to increase voter turnout. Journal of Communication 66 (4): 542–63.

Kennedy, Chris, and Michelle Mayorga. 18 November 2008. Text message experiments in 2008. Presentation at Analyst Institute. Available from https://www.slideshare.net/ck37/text-message-experiments-2008.  

Owen, Diana, and Alissa Irion-Groth. 2024. “Preparing Students for Civic Engagement through Project Citizen,” paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, September 6. https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/article-details/66d31fb120ac769e5f762ed1 

Merivaki, Thessalia. 2022. Making national voter registration day a course assignment. PS: Political Science & Politics 55 (2): 387–89.

Teresi, Holly, and Melissa R. Michelson. 2015. Wired to mobilize: The effect of social networking messages on voter turnout. Social Science Journal 52 (2): 195–204.

Young, Dannagal G., Matthew A. Baum, and Duncan Prettyman. 2021. vMOBilize: Gamifying civic learning and political engagement in a classroom context. Journal of Political Science Education 17 (1): 32–54.