Self-Advocacy Activities and Voting Participation In Matched Samples of Americans with IDD

Background

Political participation is a key feature of democracies, and voting is the primary mechanism by which many people participate in the political process, yet voting is not available equally to all. Despite legal protections people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) participate in voting at low rates.

If people with disabilities had voted at the same rate as people without disabilities in 2020, about 1.75 million more votes would have been cast. The gap in turnout remains around six points (Schur & Kruse, 2021).Turnout is particularly low for people with IDD. A nationally representative study of adults with IDD found 54% of respondents had voted or had the opportunity to do so. In contrast, approximately 66% of the total eligible voting population of the United States turned out for the 2020 presidential election (Pew Research Center, 2023).

Participation in self-advocacy events that help people with IDD know and exercise their rights can help people with IDD gain empowerment (Agran et al., 2016). Further, participation in self-advocacy activities can help build normative support for civic participation in peer networks (Harris et al., 2022).

Thus, in this study, we sought to test whether matched samples of adults with IDD who had and had not participated in self-advocacy activities exhibited different outcomes related to voting, based on a representative random sample of adults with IDD who use state-funded services.

Method

Our n=3142 came from five annual cohorts (2018-22) of adults with IDD who use state funded services. Each cohort was independently selected at random from all adult IDD service users in the state. We merged two data sources (NCI-IDD and SIS-A) for each participant to create our dataset.

We used R to conduct propensity score matching to create equivalent groups of adults with IDD who had and had not participated in self advocacy activities. We matched based on 11 factors in prior literature that had been shown to promote or hinder voting participation as well as demographics. We then tested the relationship between self advocacy participation and voting opportunity using generalized boosted regression.

Results

20.8% of our sample reported participation in self-advocacy activities and 47.4% reported having the opportunity to vote. The augmented inverse probability weighting (AIPW) model estimated a statistically significant average treatment effect (ATE) of 0.127 (SE = 0.046, z = 2.78, p = .005, 95% CI [0.038, 0.217]), suggesting that engagement in self-advocacy was associated with an increased likelihood of voting of about 12.7%.

Implications & Conclusions

Findings support the wisdom of people with IDD who have long said that self advocacy is a key to empowerment of people with IDD. Social workers can have a key role in increasing voter participation for people with IDD, but fostering self advocacy and by engaging with state election boards to enhance outreach to this population. This year’s SSWR conference theme is “Social Work Research at the Service of Democracy” and this study is an embodiment of that theme.