The acquisition of voting habits

A stubborn stylized fact that has been established in the voting behavior literature is that young people vote at lower rates than older people. This age gap seems so persistent across a variety of political contexts and periods as to be often given the status of truism. Evidence abounds, both at the individual (Powell 1986; Highton and Wolfinger 2001; Wattenberg 2007) and the aggregate level (Franklin 2004). ¹