As the old saying goes, 90 percent of politics is just a facade. That’s a good thing for people who are already involved in the political system and want to influence it. What about the rest of us? There are millions of people in America who don’t normally vote or participate in politics. Is there a way for people who don’t normally participate in politics to get involved?
It’s a topic that MIT political scientist Ariel White has studied extensively over the past decade. White has conducted careful empirical research on often-overlooked topics, such as the relationship between incarceration and political participation; how people interact with government regulators; and how factors ranging from media coverage to income inequality affect political participation.
While the media gives a lot of coverage to the opinions of regular voters in certain areas, little attention is paid to citizens who don’t vote regularly but are able to vote. To understand American politics, this helps us to understand such people better.
“I think there’s a much broader story being told here,” said White, an associate professor of political science at MIT.
Study after study, her research tells the story. White has found that even short prison sentences associated with minor crimes make people less likely to vote and make their families less inclined to vote. People convicted of felonies often lose their right to vote, but even when they are eligible to vote, they turn out less often. White’s other research also found that an 8 percent increase in the minimum wage increases voter turnout by about a third of a percent, and that people who receive public benefits are less likely to vote than those who don’t.
While these issues are often viewed in partisan terms, White believes the reality is much more complicated: When assessing infrequent or out-of-contact voters, we don’t have enough information to make inferences about these issues.
“Having people with criminal records register to vote isn’t necessarily an advantage for anyone,” White said. “There’s a lot of diversity within this group that people don’t acknowledge. Lawmakers tend to view this as a partisan issue, but at the public level there’s less polarization and more people willing to support a path for others to return to normal life.”
Experience counts
White grew up near Rochester, New York, and majored in economics and political science at Cornell University. She said she didn’t initially plan on attending the academy, but tried out a few jobs after graduation. One of them, working as a legal assistant at an AmeriCorps-funded law firm, made a lasting impact. It led her to think more about the nature of government and its people’s engagement in these situations.
“I was really struck by how people’s experiences in person with government representatives trying to get benefits really shape how they view how government operates and how they view the public and what they can expect from their government,” White said. “People’s experiences with their government influence what they do politically.”
Shortly thereafter, White was accepted into Harvard University’s doctoral program, where he earned his master’s degree in 2012 and his doctorate in 2016. White then joined the MIT faculty in 2016 and has remained there ever since.
White’s first paper, co-authored with Julie Farrar and Noah Nathan, published in 2015, found that government officials tend to be responsive in providing voting information to people of distinct ethnicities. The paper won an award from the American Political Science Association. (Nathan is now also a lecturer at MIT.)
Since then, White has published a series of papers examining what factors interact with voting trends. In a study focused on Pennsylvania, she found that welfare recipients made up 20% of eligible voters in 2020, but only 12% of those who voted. Looking at the criminal justice system, White found that inmates’ voter turnout dropped by a few percentage points, even if their sentences were short. Family members of those serving short sentences were also less likely to vote in the near future, although turnout rebounded over time.
“People don’t often think of incarceration as something that is politically relevant,” White said. “Specifically, because many people have been incarcerated or convicted or live in families or communities with high incarceration rates, they are less politically active and have lower voter turnout. Because incarceration is so widespread in America, it seems like one of the most pervasive and impactful things that government can do, yet for a long time, its study has been left to sociology.”
How do we reach people?
White’s study, which found that citizens are less likely to vote in many cases, now turns to a related question: What are the most feasible ways to change that? Certainly, nothing is likely to create a new tsunami of voters. Another study found that even if felons were allowed to vote from prison, turnout would be in the single digits. Overall, people who are accustomed to not voting are not going to be more likely to vote.
But this fall, White led a new field experiment to encourage unregistered voters to register and vote. In this case, she and a few colleagues created a study designed to find out whether friends of unregistered voters are especially likely to get on the voter roll through their own networks. The results are still under review. But for White, this is new territory that seems open to different kinds of testing and research.
“A lot is known in political science in general, and in the world of actual political campaigns, about how to mobilize registered voters to vote,” White said. “There’s a lot of work to do — door-to-door canvassing, mailings, phone calls, text messages — but about a quarter of voters are simply not registered, making them truly invisible in the political world, and so we know very little about them. Most of the people I’m interested in fall into that group.”
It’s a topic she hopes will also help keep her students interested. White’s classes often attract students with a wide variety of majors but with a long-standing interest in social life. White hopes her students will gain a deeper understanding of social context as well as acquire new tools to conduct clear empirical research. And who knows? Like White herself, some of her students may eventually become politicians, without realizing it yet.
“I’ve really enjoyed working with the MIT students,” White said. “I hope that they’ll gain important insights into what we know about political life and how we can know it, which I think will be useful to them in a number of areas. My hope is that they’ll walk away with a fundamental understanding of social science research, and some big questions and big concepts to take with them into the world.”
