Examining Trends in Youth Voting: The effect of turnout, competition, and candidate attributes.

When eighteen year olds gained the right to vote in 1972, political scientists expected this group to vote in large numbers, taking advantage of this new liberty. However, this did not happen as expected. Rather, youth voter turnout has been the lowest of all the voting age population. Many scholars have attempted to explain why the youth do not vote in the presidential election. In this paper, we attempt to explain some of the voting behaviors of this age group, and reach a conclusion as to what factors may lead to increases in youth voter turnout. We will look specifically at the competition of the elections and the candidate characteristics believed to be appealing to youth voters to find correlations between these factors and the youth vote. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]