Record Details

Does Incarceration Reduce Voting? Evidence about the Political Consequences of Spending Time in Prison

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Does Incarceration Reduce Voting? Evidence about the Political Consequences of Spending Time in Prison
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6WBQ7U
 
Creator Alan S. Gerber
Gregory A. Huber
Marc Meredith
Daniel R. Biggers
David J. Hendry
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description The rise in mass incarceration provides a growing impetus to understand the effect that interactions with the criminal justice system have on political participation. While a substantial body of prior research studies the political consequences of criminal disenfranchisement, less work examines why eligible ex-felons vote at very low rates. We use administrative data on voting and interactions with the criminal justice system from Pennsylvania to assess whether the association between incarceration and reduced voting is causal. Using administrative records that reduce the possibility of measurement error, we employ several different research designs to investigate the possibility that the observed negative correlation between incarceration and voting might result from differences across individuals that both lead to incarceration and low participation. As this selection bias issue is addressed, we find that the estimated effect of serving time in prison on voting falls dramatically and for some research designs vanishes entirely.
 
Subject Social Sciences
voter turnout, policy feedback, incarceration, carceral state
 
Contributor MEREDITH, MARC