Does Incarceration Reduce Voting? Evidence about the Political Consequences of Spending Time in Prison

The rise in mass incarceration provides a growing impetus to understand the effect that interactions with the criminal justice system have on political participation. While a substantial body of prior research studies the political consequences of criminal disenfranchisement, less work examines why eligible ex-felons vote at very low rates. We use administrative data on voting and interactions with the criminal justice system from Pennsylvania to assess whether the association between incarceration and reduced voting is causal. Using administrative records that reduce the possibility of measurement error, we employ several different research designs to investigate the possibility that the observed negative correlation between incarceration and voting might result from differences across individuals that both lead to incarceration and low participation. As this selection bias issue is addressed, we find that the estimated effect of serving time in prison on voting falls dramatically and for some research designs vanishes entirely.

大规模监禁（mass incarceration）趋势的持续扩张，使得学界愈发有动力去探究刑事司法系统接触对政治参与的影响效应。尽管已有大量前期研究聚焦于刑事剥夺选举权（criminal disenfranchisement）所带来的政治后果，但针对符合投票资格的刑释重罪犯投票率仍极低的原因展开的探究却相对不足。本研究采用来自宾夕法尼亚州（Pennsylvania）的投票行为与刑事司法系统接触情况行政数据（administrative data），旨在评估监禁与投票率降低之间的关联是否具有因果性。依托能够降低测量误差风险的行政记录，本研究采用多种不同的研究设计，以检验观测到的监禁与投票之间的负相关关系，是否源于同时引发监禁与低政治参与的个体层面差异——即选择性偏差问题。在解决该选择性偏差问题后，我们发现服刑对投票行为的估计效应大幅衰减，部分研究设计下该效应甚至完全消失。