Recent research has cast doubt on the potential for various electoral reforms to increase voter turnout. In this article, we examine the effectiveness of preregistration laws, which allow young citizens to register before being eligible to vote. We use two empirical approaches to evaluate the impact of preregistration on youth turnout. First, we implement differencein-difference and lag models to bracket the causal effect of preregistration implementation using the [2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008][2009][2010][2011][2012] (Bennion and Nickerson 2011;Hanmer et al. 2010;Herrnson et al. 2008;Niemi et al. 2009;Ponoroff and Weiser 2010). While it was once commonly assumed that reducing legal obstacles to voting would inevitably lead to higher turnout (Burnham 1987;Lijphart 1997; Powell 1986; Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980) We wish to thank the National Science Foundation (Grant #SES-1416816) for their generous support for this project. In addition, we wish to thank Barry C. Burden, Michael McDonald, Steven A. Snell, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. Finally, we wish to thank Matthew Tyler for his invaluable work as a research assistant. Data and code for replicating our results can be found in the AJPS Data Archive on Dataverse (http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/ajps). depress political engagement (Burden et al. 2014). As one scholar succinctly put it, "non-participants are not likely to flood the polls simply because registration barriers diminish" (Timpone 1998, 155).An electoral reform that has nonetheless gained momentum in recent years is preregistration, whereby individuals younger than 18 are able to complete their registration application so that they are automatically added to the registration rolls once they come of age. Preregistration laws have been implemented in a dozen states, debated in at least 19 others in the last 5 years, and proposed in the U.S. Congress (2004). The policy is of particular salience and controversy in North Carolina, where preregistration was implemented with wide bipartisan support in 2009 and then abruptly repealed 4 years later by a newly elected Republican majority in the state legislature.1 Allegations swirled that the repeal was an attempt to impede future turnout among young voters, who had disproportionately voted Democratic in the 2012 election.2 On both sides of the aisle, policy makers seemed to assume that preregistration would increase youth Furthermore, recent scholarly research evaluating other electoral reforms offers a rather bleak outlook for the potential to increase citizen engagement through institutional changes. In this article, we estimate the causal effect of preregistration on youth turnout using two complementary approaches. First, using a nationally representative, pooled cross-section from the 2000-2012 Current Population Survey, we implement a difference-in-difference approach. We supplement this with lag models to create bracketed estimates of preregistration's impact (Angrist and Pischke 2008;Manski 1990...

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Recent child development research shows that the psychosocial or noncognitive skills that children develop—including the ability to self-regulate and integrate in social settings—are important for success in school and beyond. Are these skills learned in childhood also important for adult political behaviors like voting? In this article, I use a unique school-based 20-year field experiment to explore whether children who develop psychosocial skills early on are more likely to vote in adulthood than those who do not. Matching subjects to voter files, I show that this intervention had a noticeable long-run impact on political participation. These results highlight the need to better understand how childhood experiences shape civic behaviors later in life. During this critical period, children can be taught the not explicitly political, but still vital, skills that set them on a path toward political participation in adulthood.

We are transforming our schools . . . . We are insisting on accountability, empowering parents . . . and making sure that local people are in charge. We will leave no child behind.

A defining characteristic of charter schools is that they introduce a strong market element into public education. In this paper, we examine through the lens of a market model the evolution of the charter school sector in North Carolina between 1999 and 2012. We examine trends in the mix of students enrolled in charter schools, the racial imbalance of charter schools, patterns in student match quality by schools’ racial composition, and the distributions of test score performance gains compared to those in traditional public schools. In addition, we use student fixed effects models to examine plausibly causal measures of charter school effectiveness. Our findings indicate that charter schools in North Carolina are increasingly serving the interests of relatively able white students in racially imbalanced schools and that despite improvements in the charter school sector over time, charter schools are still no more effective on average than traditional public schools.

Despite clear evidence of an income gradient in political participation, research has not been able to isolate the effects of income on voting from other household characteristics. We investigate how exogenous unconditional cash transfers affected voting in US elections across two generations from the same household. The results confirm that there is strong inter-generational correlation in voting across parents and their children. We also show-consistent with theorythat household receipt of unconditional cash transfers has heterogeneous effects on the civic participation of children coming from different socioeconomic backgrounds. It increases children's voting propensity in adulthood among those raised in initially poorer families. However, income transfers have no effect on parents, regardless of initial income levels. These results suggest that family circumstance during childhood-income in particular-plays a role in influencing levels of political participation in the United States. Further, in the absence of outside shocks, income differences are transmitted across generations and likely contribute to the intergenerational transmission of social and political inequality.

Although public administration scholars have long studied discrimination on the basis of race/ethnicity, class, and gender, little to no research exists on whether street‐level bureaucrats provide differential services based on the religious identity of their constituents. This article reports the results from a large‐scale correspondence study of street‐level bureaucrats in the American public school system. The authors emailed the principals of a large sample of public schools and asked for a meeting, randomly assigning the religious (non)affiliation of the family. To get at potential causal mechanisms, religious belief intensity was also randomly assigned. The findings show evidence of substantial discrimination against Muslims and atheists on a par with, and sometimes larger than, the racial discrimination found in previous studies. These individuals are substantially less likely to receive a response, with discrimination growing when they signal that their beliefs are more intense. Protestants and Catholics face no discrimination unless they signal that their religious beliefs are intense.

Gun violence is a large and growing problem in the United States. Many reformers look towards elections to spur policy change in this area. In this paper, we explore the effects of school shootings on electoral mobilization and election outcomes. We pair data from several sources that measure validated voter registration; validated voter turnout; and the electoral performance of officials at the local, state, and federal levels with regression discontinuity and panel methods. Our effects show that shootings have little to no effect on electoral outcomes in the United States. Our work demonstrates that even when tragic events occur that are squarely in the realm of elected officials’ responsibility, have high levels of issue salience, are highly-covered by the media, draw citizens’ attention, and (perhaps) shift public opinion, these seemingly favorable conditions may not be enough to elicit democratic accountability.