Over the past few months, I have been working on my honors thesis, which explores voter turnout as a function of social mobility. It was an incredibly valuable and enlightening and experience. I am honored to say that my work was affirmed this past week when I was chosen as the recipient of the Pi Sigma Alpha “Mike Gilotti” Best Thesis Award. Anyone can read my thesis on the Schreyer portal, but I thought I would share the gist here because very few of us have time to read 60 pages on a whim.

Recent literature on voter turnout has demonstrated the complicated pathways through which social context influences peoples’ decision to vote. This analysis expands the explanatory scope of these studies by exploring how social mobility—the probability that children will be economically better off than their parents—influences voter turnout across Pennsylvania. With a dataset composed of voter lists for every county in Pennsylvania, this analysis employs a multilevel model (HLM) to estimate the independent and joint effects of individual-level demographic and county-level economic factors on voter turnout for the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections. The results of this study illustrate several notable patterns in how voters across Pennsylvania participate in electoral politics. First, Model 1 demonstrates that Democrats and Independents are less likely to vote than Republicans, and that the strength of this effect is moderated by county-level social mobility. Although there is further research to be done in establishing whether social mobility fosters divergent participatory patterns between partisans, the results from Model 2 suggest that while social mobility reduces electoral participation among all registered voters, the effect is more pronounced for Independents in upwardly mobile counties and less pronounced for Democrats. These findings are notable in that they open the door for the possibility that the social and economic characteristics that define an upwardly mobile community are not positively associated with participation, but rather foster a standard of participation that residents of the county move towards, regardless of whether they are Democrats or Republicans. Notably, Independents seem to exhibit more divergent voting patterns in counties with higher levels of social mobility. Additionally, the results from Model 2 indicate that the negative effect of being in Age Cohort 2 (25-34) on voting is less pronounced in counties with higher levels of social mobility. This pattern stands in contrast to the interactive effects for the other age groups, which suggest that the direct effects are magnified in counties with higher social mobility. There is certainly more work to be done to validate these findings, however, it is possible that areas of higher social mobility provide a more common experience for individuals between the ages of 25 and 34 and 35 and 44, which would explain why the negative effect of being in the second age cohort (25-34) is moderated by higher levels of social mobility. Overall, these findings capture the essence of the theory that motivated this analysis: place matters. Thus, in researching how people behave, it is important to pay attention to where they are behaving.