Want to increase voter turnout? Start with the workplace

Tom Florsheim Jr. is chairman and CEO of Weyco Group. Adam Goodman is president and CEO of Goodmans Interior Structures. Both are part of Leadership Now Project’s network of business leaders; the group is named in this piece.

It’s hard to improve voter turnout. Just ask campaign and PAC leaders who spend hundreds of millions of dollars each election cycle trying to get people to vote—blanketing TV and social media platforms with paid advertising, and investing in canvassing, phone banks, and mailers. All this money barely moves the needle. Randomized trials suggest that even a well-executed canvass can only juice turnout by a point or two at most.

New research has uncovered a much more powerful lever for driving turnout: America’s employers. Researchers linked LinkedIn employment records to voter files—studying 30 million workers at 377,000 employers. They found that a person’s workplace is decisive in whether or not they choose to vote.

To account for employee selection bias, researchers at Michigan, Harvard, Columbia, and Maryland also tracked 8 million people who changed jobs. Their findings? Workers who moved to a higher-scoring employer became 3.5 percentage points more likely to vote. If they moved from an employer at the 25th percentile to one at the 75th, they became 5.8 percentage points more likely to vote. And the effects hold across political affiliations.

These results point to a striking conclusion: employers........

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