Voting at 16: Intended and unintended consequences of Austria's electoral reform

Abstract

Several democracies are currently debating whether to lower their legal voting age to 16, but relatively little is known about the long-term consequences of such reforms. We contribute to this debate by studying electoral habit formation among 16-year-old voters in Austria, where the national-level voting age was decreased in 2007. We employ eligibility-based regression discontinuities to evaluate two consequences of the reform. First, we show that eligible 16-year-olds are more likely to vote in future elections. Second, we demonstrate that the political consequences of this reform were not neutral. Newly eligible young voters are more likely to place themselves towards the extremes of the ideological spectrum. We also simulate the cumulative long-term impact on electoral outcomes and argue that the reform was costly for the centrist government parties that initially adopted it.