Misdemeanor Disenfranchisement? Short Jail Sentences and Voting

Date
-
Event Sponsor
The Munro Lectureship Fund and The Lane Center
Location
Encina Hall West, Room 400 (GSL)
Speaker

Ariel White, Assistant Professor of Political Science, MIT

 

Abstract

This paper presents new causal estimates of incarceration's effect on voting, using administrative data on criminal sentencing and voter turnout. I use the random case assignment process of a major county court system as a source of exogenous variation in the sentencing of misdemeanor cases. Focusing on misdemeanor defendants allows for generalization to a large pool of people, as such cases are extremely common. Among first-time misdemeanor defendants, I find evidence that receiving a short jail sentence decreases voting in the next election by several percentage points. Results differ starkly by race. White defendants show no demobilization, while Black defendants show a turnout decrease of about 13 percentage points due to jail time. Evidence from pre- arrest voter histories suggest that this difference could be due to racial differences in who is arrested. These results paint a picture of large-scale, racially-disparate voter demobilization in the wake of incarceration.

 

Biography

Ariel White is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at MIT. She studies voting and voting rights, race, ethnicity, immigration policy, and the criminal justice system. Her work uses large datasets to measure individual-level experiences, and to shed light on people's everyday interactions with government. She received her PhD in Government from Harvard University, where she was a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy (at Harvard's Kennedy School) and a Radcliffe fellow. Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, and is forthcoming in Political Behavior and the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics.