Project 4.1 The UX of Democracy

Brief: What is democracy? Where is democracy? What do we expect from democracy?

Group Partners: Nancy Obeid, Sarah Mack, Abigail Zhang, Evelyn Tang, Jae Xu, Chun Li

The most significant sign of democracy has the right to vote. As Chinese, I do not have the experience of voting. However, I wondered if everybody has the power and opportunity to vote, will they vote? Will they believe they can get real democracy through voting? What do people expect when they vote?

Topic Options:

After the first meeting, we came out with a list of subjects that we can look up to.

- language of political programs which may affect people's decision

- campaigns that push people to vote

- the actual physical space of elections

- general background (countries that have a successful voting system and the countries that don't)

Literature Review:

There is research proved that some people vote because they feel the duty to vote. (Galais, 2016) However, the duty is differentiated by whether if there is an impact of the election on their daily lives. Different levels of the election would have different rates of voting, such as people would feel a stronger duty to vote in national and regional polls, but a weaker sense of responsibility to vote in the European election.

According to the stats, young age groups of people has the lowest vote rate in the presidential election for decades in the US. Also, about 64% of voters aged 18-24 went to polls, but 90% of over-65s voted in the EU referendum. (Knoester, 2017)

Discussion:

After collecting our literature reviews, we would like to focus on people's voting behavior. Many factors could affect voting turnouts, and we categorized them into social-economic factors, institutional factors, and individual factors.

Social-economic factors: population size, population stability, and economic development

Institutional factors: using an electric voting system would increase the voting rate, e.g., India. compulsory voting, registration requirements, voting arrangements

Individual factors: education background(highly educated more likely to vote), civic duty, age(young people are less likely to vote)

Purpose:

Many factors may impact people's voting behavior. There is an urgent problem that young people are not voting. However, they are the future, and they should take charge of deciding their life. Based on that, we would like to focus on raising the awareness of voting in the young generation of people.

Reference:

Galais, C. and Blais, A., 2016. Do people feel more of a duty to vote in some elections?. West European Politics, 39(4), pp.755-777.

Knoester, M. & Kretz, L. 2017, "Why do young adults vote at low rates? Implications for education", Social Studies Research and Practice, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 139-153.