RAPID: Collaborative Research: Collaborative Multi Racial Post Election Survey (CMPS)

Felony disenfranchisement is the loss of the right to vote after conviction of a felony. In the United States an estimated 5.85 million voting age citizens are ineligible to vote due to a felony conviction. While political participation for returning citizens is restricted in many states, the extent to which such restrictions might have more diffuse consequences in the communities where these individuals reside has yet to be examined. Just as others have argued that incarceration rates affect broader political participation, it is possible that felon disenfranchisement leads to more widespread political disengagement at the community level. Because the population of citizens convicted of felonies reflects the hyperincarceration of African Americans, this issue is likely to have a disproportionate impact on African American communities. The primary hypothesis for this project is that communities with higher rates of disenfranchised returning citizens should see lower turnout of voting eligible citizens, through a combination of network effects and low political efficacy. I will also investigate a conditional hypothesis: Because of the importance of the African American vote to political parties, some mobilization efforts targeting voters who might otherwise abstain could counteract lower turnout in these communities, depending on the competitiveness of the electoral race. These hypotheses will be tested using survey questions including an embedded experiment with a sample of 1,000 African American voters.