Welcome to the New Voters Research Network!

Edition 1, September 2023

The New Voters Research Network (NVRN) is dedicated to better understanding the voting behavior and political socialization of high school students through rigorous youth-led political science research. We are a 12-member research group comprised of high school and college students led by Director Jahnavi Rao (President and Founder of New Voters, Senior Fellow at CDCE at UMD) and Deputy Director Sydney Fahn (Georgetown ‘27). We are actively seeking collaborations with scholars, academic institutions, and youth serving organizations who share our commitment to addressing the lack of representation for high school students in research and as researchers.

In this newsletter, you can find:

• An overview of a few NVRN projects:

  • The Youth Vote & Early Voting (Published)

  • Pennsylvania Case Study

  • Delaware Civics Attendance Policy RCT

• A reflection on the New Researchers Summer Program

If you want to help us in our mission, please share this newsletter!

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Through the New Voters Research Network, we aim to:

• Conduct groundbreaking research on the experiences and political behavior of high school students to improve civic engagement and Get Out the Vote efforts

• Evaluate existing high school voter registration methods and develop new programming by collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data

• Cultivate a space for student researchers to lead original research and work closely with academic scholars and community partners

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In each newsletter, we will highlight a few of our ongoing and completed research projects. Read below to see three projects led by high school and college students!

Select Projects

(1) Lending a Voice to All: Early Voting Paving the Way to Youth Representation in America (PUBLISHED)

Team Members: Advait Rajan (ASU ‘27), Josephine Murphy (High School)

• In this completed paper, Rajan and Murphy focused on how early voting contributed to youth turnout in recent elections in AZ and PA, two of New Voters’ focus states.

• Their paper, “Lending a Voice to All: Early Voting Paving the Way to Youth Representation in America,” was published this August in the Oxford Political Review, pg. 27-29, at https://oxfordpoliticalreview.com/issues/

(2) Pennsylvania Case Study

Team Members: Anish Garimidi (UPenn ‘27), Collin Wang (High School)

• Through contacting every high school in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, PA natives Garimidi and Wang evaluated the current state of civic engagement resources provided by each of these schools in this case study. They are currently meeting with nonprofits to verify their data.

• Each school was ranked based on four variables: partnership with civic nonprofits, presence of a staff voting contact, serving as a polling place, and civic engagement of parents.

• In the future, they aim to publish the study on the NVRN website and distribute it to lawmakers, city governments, and nonprofits.

(3) Delaware Civics Attendance Policy RCT

Team Members: Jaden Wu (High School), Olivia Zhang (UF ‘27)

• This team is analyzing high school student awareness and usage of the recent change in Delaware’s school attendance policy, which gives public school students one excused absence per year to participate in civics related activities.

• They are collaborating on this project with five academics (and counting), including Professor Michael Hanmer from the University of Maryland and various researchers from the University of Delaware and Delaware State University.

• Through testing informational interventions in a randomized control trial, their survey will test how different mediums of communication effect how high schoolers understand and take advantage of this policy.

Collaborate with us!

If you are interested in collaborating with us on our projects, we would love your support! We are currently looking for academics and researchers to partner with us on six ongoing projects, proposed by our high school and college student researchers. We are open to many different levels of involvement, which you can learn about on the link below.

Reflecting on the New Researchers Summer Program

This summer, 17 incredible high school students completed our inaugural New Researchers Summer Program. We created this program to address the lack of support and resources for high school students to lead original research projects in the social sciences. During this free 8-week program, students met for 6 hours per week for workshops and lectures, from sessions on the importance of ethics in research with graduate student Georgina Rivers to how to present research with Professor Ciocca Eller. Students used this knowledge to develop an original research proposal, which they then pitched in a research competition to leading academics. Check out our 1st Place winner, Tanishka Sharma, a high school sophomore at Notre Dame Catholic Secondary School, pitch her research proposal below:

In addition to their research proposals, students also contributed to a comprehensive literature review detailing the current research on high school civic engagement. This paper will be submitted for publication later this year with all students listed as co-authors!

This newsletter was created by Research Assistants Olivia Zhang (UF ‘27) and Jaden Wu (High School).