UW voter engagement coalition signals they’re okay with lower male voting rate
A healthy democracy functions best when there is broad engagement that reflects the population being represented.
The student newspaper for the University of Washington published an article last month under the headline “UW organizations push to boost student engagement ahead of 2024 election”.
Prior to reading the article we assumed that the organizations working to boost student engagement are paying attention to disparities between sub-groups of students in their rates of voting. Having recently pointed out that young men in Washington vote at lower rates than young women, we wondered if that issue would come up here.
“Campus-affiliated groups are working to increase voter registration, expand election-related learning, and see higher student participation before Nov. 5.” – The Daily
The Daily article brought to our attention Democracy Dawgs, “a campus coalition of faculty, staff, students, and community partners working to coordinate efforts to increase student voter and democratic engagement efforts.” The coalition consists of 49 members representing students, faculty, community/national organizations, and local election offices. Representatives from over twenty entities are involved with the coalition, including the Associated Students of the University of Washington, the Washington Public Interest Research Group, and King County Elections.
Democracy Dawgs relies on data from NLSVE
The Democracy Dawgs coalition laid out their goals and strategies in a 2024 Democratic Engagement Action Plan. The plan’s data source for knowing the landscape of UW students’ rates of voter registration and voter turnout prior to the 2024 election is a report issued by the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NLSVE), a project of Tufts University.
The NLSVE report for UW-Seattle highlights disparities among students in rates of voting along five factors:
- Race/ethnicity (p. 7)
- Age (p. 10)
- Sex (p. 12)
- Education level (p. 13)
- Field of study (p. 14)
In their action plan, Democracy Dawgs do in fact seek to address disparities, but their plan omits one of those five factors. The factor they omit is the sex-based disparity.
Male students voted at lower rates than female students in every election in the NLSVE dataset — 2014, 2018, 2020, and 2022 — by a difference of between two and seven percentage points. For example, an estimated 38% of female students attending UW-Seattle voted in the 2022 election and an estimated 33% of male students voted, which is a five percentage point difference. If male students voted in 2022 at the same rate as female students, an additional 1,270 ballots would have been cast by young men.
Not only does the action plan fail to address undervoting by young men, it proposes a collaboration with the League of Women Voters, which one might expect to increase female engagement, further widening the gender gap.
Democracy Dawgs could commit to finding out whether any organization is striving to increase voter registration and turnout among men in particular (or whether any is willing to do so) and potentially collaborate with that organization. With the University of Washington’s Brotherhood Initiative being right there on campus, Democracy Dawgs could look at cooperating with them to increase democratic engagement among young men.
Young men vote less. Is that a problem?
In June of this year, Washington Initiative for Boys and Men published an article detailing our findings about rates of voter registration and turnout among men and women in different age cohorts.
In that article we made the following prediction:
“We expect that the share of Washington men ages 18 to 34 who vote in the November 2024 election will be between 5 and 10 percentage points lower than the share of women the same age who vote. That amounts to around 50,000 fewer votes by young men.”
We don’t have data yet to be able to evaluate the accuracy of our prediction, but we are eager to get that data and see what it shows. We also don’t yet have NLSVE data on UW-Seattle students’ participation in the 2024 election. Once that it is released we can see whether the pattern continued of female students voting at higher rates than male students.
Should leaders want to close male gender gaps?
WIBM regularly observes that if boys and men are on the disadvantaged side of a gender gap, the gap is not acknowledged — whether by journalists, academics, activists, or those in government. Male gender gaps are seemingly not deemed worthy of taking specific actions to remedy.
The Democracy Dawgs’ Democratic Engagement Action Plan is yet another example of neglecting a disparity in which boys and men are most impacted.
If it is politically incorrect or otherwise off-putting to acknowledge areas where boys and men are underperforming, how as a society will we get to a place where we can target efforts to uplift males where they need uplifting? How will we convince boys and men that equity and equality are for them too, rather than being a path to them being sidelined?
If we want civic engagement efforts to be truly (and believably) equitable, they need to be fully inclusive and to acknowledge adverse disparities wherever those may occur. Ignoring young men sends a signal that voter engagement efforts like those organized by Democracy Dawgs are competitive — and partisan — rather than inclusive and focused on full participation in civic life.
The NLSVE data source clearly shows disparities in voter engagement along five factors: race/ethnicity (p. 7), age (p. 10), sex (p. 12), educational level (p. 13), and field of study (p. 14). Democracy Dawgs’ action plan omits one of those five disparities — the one that would compel them to pay specific attention to young men.
