Lowering the voting age from 18 to 16 has moved from a fringe proposal to an active policy experiment in over a dozen countries and a handful of American cities. The evidence from these experiments is now substantial enough to evaluate real outcomes rather than trade hypotheticals, and the results challenge assumptions on both sides of the debate. Austria, Scotland, Norway, and Brazil all offer distinct natural experiments, each revealing something different about what happens when younger teenagers gain access to the ballot.
What Happened When Austria Opened the Polls to 16-Year-Olds
Austria became the first EU country to lower the national voting age to 16 in 2007, and the turnout data surprised many skeptics. In Vienna, an estimated 64.2 percent of 16- to 17-year-olds voted, substantially higher than the 56.3 percent turnout among 18- to 20-year-olds. The pattern held in the smaller city of Krems, where 56.3 percent of the youngest first-time voters participated compared with 46.3 percent of older first-time voters.1PubMed Central. Are People More Inclined to Vote at 16 than at 18? Evidence for the First-Time Voting Boost Among 16- to 25-Year-Olds in Austria That gap is not trivial. The youngest group outperformed the next cohort up by roughly eight to ten percentage points depending on the city.
The leading explanation for this pattern centers on what political scientists call the “first-time voting boost.” At 16, most people still live at home with their parents, attend school daily, and are embedded in a stable community. By 18 or 19, many have left home for university or work, landing in an unfamiliar place with weaker social ties. That rootedness at 16 appears to make it easier to get to a polling station, to have conversations about candidates, and to feel connected to local issues. The Austrian data suggest that the instability of leaving home, not age itself, is what depresses turnout among young adults.
Whether the Habit Sticks
One of the strongest arguments for lowering the voting age is that voting is habit-forming. If you vote the first time you are eligible, you are more likely to vote the next time and the time after that. Scotland offered a test of this idea when it allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in the 2014 independence referendum and subsequent Scottish Parliament elections. Researchers found that young people who were eligible to vote at 16 or 17 exhibited greater levels of turnout in the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections, up to seven years after first gaining the vote, compared with those who voted for the first time at 18 or older.2Politics and Governance. Longer‐Term Effects of Voting at Age 16: Higher Turnout Among Young People in Scotland
The Scottish finding comes with a meaningful caveat. The higher turnout among those who first voted at 16 did not extend to non-electoral political engagement. Signing petitions, attending protests, contacting elected officials: none of those showed the same boost. The habit that formed was specifically about showing up to vote, not about becoming broadly more politically active. That distinction matters because some advocates frame lowering the voting age as a way to create a more engaged citizenry overall. The Scottish evidence suggests the effects may be narrower than that, though consistently voting is itself a significant outcome.
Do 16-Year-Olds Vote Competently
The “maturity” objection comes up in every debate about Votes at 16. Critics argue that teenagers lack the political knowledge and judgment to cast meaningful ballots. Research from Austria’s experience directly addressed this. While turnout among voters under 18 was relatively low in absolute terms, their failure to vote could not be explained by lower ability or motivation. The quality of their choices was similar to that of older voters, meaning they cast votes in ways that enabled their interests to be represented equally well.3PubMed Central. Voting at 16: Turnout and the quality of vote choice In other words, when 16-year-olds did vote, their ballots reflected coherent political preferences, not random or poorly informed selections.
A separate concern runs in the other direction: that young people are especially susceptible to online misinformation. A large scoping review of over 150 studies on people aged 5 to 25 found that young people often expressed high confidence in their ability to judge information, yet struggled to detect false information in practice. Their typical response was passive: ignoring false content rather than actively countering it.4Computers in Human Behavior. Young people and false information: A scoping review of responses, influential factors, consequences, and prevention programs This vulnerability is real, but it is worth noting that adults are far from immune to the same problem. Misinformation susceptibility correlates with cognitive biases and social dynamics that persist well past adolescence. The question is not whether 16-year-olds are perfect information consumers but whether they are meaningfully worse than the adults who already vote, and the evidence on vote quality suggests the gap is smaller than critics assume.
How Family Dynamics Shape Young Voters
One reason 16-year-olds may vote at higher rates and with coherent preferences is that most of them still live with their parents. Research on intergenerational political transmission shows that talking about politics within families has a significant positive effect on whether children align with their parents’ party preferences. Discussions with fathers, interestingly, had a stronger effect on father-child party correspondence than discussions with mothers did on mother-child correspondence.5Youth & Society. The Intergenerational Transmission of Voting Intentions in a Multiparty Setting
This household dynamic cuts both ways in the debate. Supporters see it as a feature: 16-year-olds living at home are embedded in a political socialization environment that helps them learn how democracy works through real family conversations. Critics worry it means younger voters are simply echoing their parents rather than forming independent views, raising questions about whether the voting age extension genuinely adds new voices to the electorate. The truth likely sits somewhere in between. Parental influence fades as young people gain independent experiences, but the initial habit of voting appears to outlast the parental influence on which party to support, as the Scottish evidence on lasting turnout effects suggests.
What Changes in Government Spending
Beyond turnout and vote quality, there is the practical question: does expanding the electorate to include younger voters actually shift what governments do? Two studies from different continents suggest the answer is yes, though the direction is not always predictable.
In Norway, where selected municipalities lowered the voting age to 16 in a 2011 trial, researchers found a reduction in net operating surplus of roughly 600 Norwegian kroner (about €60) per capita in affected local governments. The interpretation is that younger voters, who tend to have higher discount rates and greater willingness to accept risk, pushed spending patterns toward the present rather than toward fiscal reserves. The effect was strongest in municipalities with low party fragmentation, a high share of left-leaning representatives, and a high share of young representatives.6Public Finance Review. Young Voters and Budget Deficits
In the United States, the mechanism worked differently. Researchers studying youth preregistration, which allows people to register before they turn 18 so they are automatically on the rolls when they become eligible, found that a one percent increase in youth voter turnout generated a 0.77 percent increase in state spending on higher education. Governments appeared to be responsive to the preferences of newly enfranchised young constituents, who unsurprisingly care about college affordability.7American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Youth Enfranchisement, Political Responsiveness, and Education Expenditure: Evidence from the US Both findings point in the same direction: when young people enter the electorate, politicians notice and adjust.
The Partisan Dimension
It would be naive to discuss lowering the voting age without acknowledging that the debate is deeply partisan. In the United Kingdom, where Scotland and Wales have already extended the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds for devolved elections, the politics of the issue are starkly divided. Public opinion at the UK-wide level has tended to oppose lowering the voting age for Westminster elections, though support among adults has shifted upward over time without reaching an outright majority. The divisions map neatly onto age and party loyalty: younger Labour supporters are the most enthusiastic, while older Conservatives are the most opposed.8The British Journal of Politics and International Relations. Public opinion, political partisanship and the Votes-at-16 debate in the United Kingdom
This partisanship is historically unusual. When the UK lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1969, there was no comparable partisan split. The Votes at 16 debate, by contrast, is expected to remain deeply partisan for years. At the devolved level in Scotland and Wales, however, what began as partisan disagreement evolved into a cross-party progressive consensus. Some opponents became supporters through a combination of electoral pragmatism and what researchers call “post-reform acquiescence,” driven partly by the visible engagement of newly enfranchised young voters.9Parliamentary Affairs. Voting Age Reform, Political Partisanship and Multi-Level Governance in the UK: The Party Politics of ‘Votes-at-16’ In short, once young people actually started voting and the sky did not fall, political opposition softened.
The partisan calculus is not unique to the UK. In the United States, proposals to lower the voting age are overwhelmingly introduced by Democrats and opposed by Republicans, reflecting the assumption that younger voters lean left. Whether that assumption holds uniformly is debatable, but the perception alone is enough to freeze legislative progress at the national level in most countries where the issue arises.
Local Experiments in the United States
While a national reduction in the US voting age would require a constitutional amendment, a handful of cities have moved ahead on their own. Takoma Park, Maryland became the first US city to lower the voting age to 16 for local elections in 2013, and several other Maryland cities followed. In 2016, Berkeley, California approved a ballot measure to lower the voting age for school board elections, while San Francisco voters narrowly rejected a similar proposal covering all local elections. These municipal experiments are small in scale but serve as testing grounds for arguments on both sides.
One practical challenge these experiments highlight is the voter registration system itself. Research on registration rules and young voters shows that confusion about eligibility is a real barrier. In states without same-day registration or clear information that 17-year-olds can register in advance, there are measurable effects on youth participation. States that provide explicit information about pre-registration eligibility or allow same-day registration see smaller gaps between potential and actual youth turnout.10Political Behavior. Am I Eligible to Register? Registration Rules, Eligibility Uncertainty, and Youth Voter Turnout The lesson is that lowering the voting age without simplifying the registration process risks undermining the reform before it has a chance to work.
Making the Reform Work in Practice
Wales provides a useful case study of what happens when implementation does not keep pace with the policy. After extending the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds for Senedd (Welsh Parliament) elections in 2021, researchers evaluated how well the rollout served young voters. The findings were mixed. Functional interventions like voter registration drives aligned with young people’s self-perceived barriers, but those efforts struggled to reach the most disengaged young people. More fundamentally, opportunities for young people to improve their understanding of political issues and party positions were lacking. Institutional barriers, which represented the dominant obstacles to young people’s electoral engagement, were widely neglected during the policy development phase.11Parliamentary Affairs. How can lowering the voting age to sixteen be successfully implemented? A framework of functional, institutional, and relational dimensions of voting age reform
The Welsh experience suggests that lowering the voting age is necessary but not sufficient. Without robust civic education, accessible registration, and institutional changes that make young people feel welcome in the political process, the reform can underperform. Austria’s relatively strong turnout among 16-year-olds occurred in a context where the reform was accompanied by significant public attention and school-based civic engagement programs. Wales, by contrast, treated the expansion more as a procedural change than a civic moment, and the results reflected that.
Brazil’s Compulsory Versus Voluntary Model
Most countries that allow 16-year-olds to vote make it optional, while voting for adults remains either compulsory or culturally expected. Brazil offers an interesting contrast. Brazilian electoral rules make voting compulsory for citizens who turn 18 before or on Election Day, while 16- and 17-year-olds can vote voluntarily.12Electoral Studies. Is compulsory voting habit-forming? Regression discontinuity evidence from Brazil This creates a sharp discontinuity at the 18th birthday: one day you can choose to vote, the next day you are legally required to.
Brazil’s setup enables researchers to study whether compulsory first-time voting creates stronger habits than voluntary first-time voting. The broader question this raises is whether the habit-forming benefits observed in Scotland and Austria depend partly on the social context: school-based peer effects, parental households, civic education, or the novelty of a new right. If the habit forms mainly because voting at 16 happens in a supportive environment, then the case for lowering the voting age is about more than just adding years of eligibility. It is about catching people at a moment when the conditions for forming a voting habit are unusually favorable.
Countries considering the reform face a genuine design choice about whether to make voting optional or mandatory for the newly eligible group, and about how much institutional support to build around the change. The evidence from multiple countries points toward the same conclusion: the age threshold matters less than the surrounding infrastructure. A 16-year-old in a household that discusses politics, attending a school with civic education, in a country with straightforward registration, is far more likely to vote and to keep voting than an 18-year-old who has recently moved to a new city with no such support systems. The case for lowering the voting age rests partly on the idea that 16 is simply a better moment in most people’s lives to start a civic habit, even if 16-year-olds are not meaningfully more politically knowledgeable than 18-year-olds.