Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Analysis

Description: Young citizens in many democracies, and more so in electoral autocracies, turn out to vote at relatively low rates. Low youth participation arguably contributes to political parties' tendency to de-prioritize the youth's policy preferences. We analyze the effect of three low-cost, scalable, theoretically-grounded, online interventions designed to encourage young Moroccans to turn out and cast an informed vote ahead of the 2021 parliamentary elections. Those interventions aimed at (1) lowering the cost of participation by providing information about the voting registration process, (2) increasing the expected benefit of voting by providing information about the stakes of the election, and about (3) the distance between respondents’ policy preferences and political parties' policy platforms. We find that while all three interventions failed to increase youth turnout on average, the two treatments designed to increase expected benefits increased turnout intentions for likely `compliers:’ those who, prior to treatment assignment, were unsure about whether to vote. Moreover, providing information about parties' policy platforms durably increased their support for the party that best represented their preferences, ultimately leading to better-informed voting. Consistent with probabilistic voting models with voting costs, the effect of the party-platforms treatment is concentrated among those who rated the party that our treatment deemed most congruent from a policy perspective as one of their two favorite parties. Contributing to information processing theories, we also find that party updating followed a form of motivated reasoning even in a context with weak party institutionalization.