Political discussion begins at home. Household dynamics following the enfranchisement of adolescent children

Abstract

Most studies on lowering the voting age to 16 exclusively focus on the effects on the adolescents concerned. In this paper we investigate the family dynamics of this extension of voting rights, by including the parents of adolescents in the study. The Ghent Study is based on a quasi-experiment of the city of Ghent (Belgium), where adolescents of 16 and 17 years old were invited by the local city government to take part in an election. The results of a regression discontinuity analysis indeed show that, in families that were targeted by the experiment, both parents and adolescents report more intensive political discussion. Our assumption therefore is that at this age, children still turn to their parents to discuss political matters. More discussions, however, did not lead to more political congruence within the family and it can be observed that ideological congruence is quite high in all families involved.