Vote Turnout of Nineteenth Amendment Women: The Enduring Effect of Disenfranchisement

"Nineteenth Amendment women" are women in the United States who came of age during or just after the era when women could not vote. The roughly 4,000 such women included in the National Election Studies of 1952-88 provide an unusual opportunity for testing whether general historical conditions during childhood and adolescence have enduring effects. Despite common claims of cohort effects, some scholars remain skeptical because cohort effects are notoriously difficult to distinguish from age and period effects. Nineteenth Amendment women were in fact less likely to vote in the 1952-88 elections and this gender gap is unique to the amendment cohorts. These results provide strong evidence for the enduring effects of a cohort's historical conditioning.