Brown Bag Seminar: Voting matters: exploring the consequences of early electoral participation

We use universal administrative data from the Netherlands (CBS) to study how exposure to elections during the final year of upper secondary school affects eligible students’ educational outcomes and field-of-study choices. For causal identification, we exploit quasi-random variation in electoral exposure across cohorts and birth months, combining election timing with the age-based voting eligibility threshold. Our empirical strategy implements a difference-in-differences design comparing students above and below the voting age in cohorts exposed and not exposed to elections during their final school year.

The study contributes to the enfranchisement literature by focusing on non-political outcomes and highlighting a potential civic channel influencing human capital investment. Preliminary findings point to effects on short-term academic performance and field-of-study choices, with heterogeneous patterns across gender.