Living Together, Voting Together: Jens Olav Dahlgaard publishes a new paper in British Journal of Political Science

Jens Olav Dahlgaard has published a paper titled “Living Together, Voting Together: Voters Moving in Together Before an Election Have Higher Turnout” along with co-authors in the British Journal of Political Science. The paper addresses a long-standing question in political behavior on why people who live together share behaviors to such a large degree. By comparing voters who move together right before an election to otherwise similar voters moving together right after the election, they show that voter turnout increases substantially as a function of cohabitation. To give a sense of the scale of the effect, they compare it with one of the strongest known predictors of voter turnout, education. The effect of living together is about as large as the difference in turnout between those with a university degree and those with vocational training. The paper is open access and available via this link.