Authors: Tali Mendelberg (Princeton University), Elizabeth Mitchell Elder (Stanford University), Ryan D. Enos (Harvard University)
Title: The Long-Term Effects of Neighborhood Disadvantage on Voting Behavior: The “Moving to Opportunity” Experiment
Journal: American Political Science Review

Research has shown that Americans living in poverty are much less likely to vote than those living in better-off neighborhoods. What is unclear is whether poverty causes lower participation or is just correlated with it. Even less is known about the effects of early-life anti-poverty programs on political participation. Mendelberg and her co-authors explored whether and how moving out of deep poverty would affect people’s voting participation.

The research involved merging decades of voter records with data from Moving to Opportunity (MTO), a federal program that randomly distributed housing vouchers to 4,600 impoverished families in five large cities across the country. The families were required to use the vouchers to move to less poor neighborhoods. Launched in 1994, MTO is one of the most ambitious anti-poverty experiments ever conducted in the United States.

“To our knowledge,” Mendelberg said, “this study is the first to randomly assign a poverty-targeting intervention to families and measure its long-term effect on the political behavior of participants of different ages.”

While relocating young children and their families from high-poverty neighborhoods to more prosperous ones improved the children’s social, economic, and educational prospects later in life, it did not make them – or their parents – more likely to register or to vote in adulthood. Further, the teenagers who participated in MTO were less likely to vote when they became of age.

“Studies of political socialization should distinguish between life stages more finely than simply adult and preadult,” Mendelberg said. “The findings overall speak to the complex relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and low political participation.”

The authors concluded that while moving families to more prosperous neighborhoods improved their living conditions – what they call “antecedents of turnout” – it did not do so sufficiently to increase voting. More effective interventions are thus necessary, and the researchers suggest policymakers “consider whether inequalities in political participation should be addressed directly, rather than as a side effect of anti-poverty programs.”

Additionally, they concluded that absent additional support, housing vouchers may not be the most effective poverty-reduction tactic.

“We have argued that poverty and political participation are important to study together because they can become linked in a vicious cycle where poverty suppresses participation and, in turn, low participation can result in reduced political power for those in poverty, so that policy solutions to address poverty are not prioritized,” the researchers wrote. “Ultimately, the most effective way of combating poverty and other inequalities may be by directly addressing inequalities in political participation and, thus, alleviating inequalities in political influence.”