First and Foremost - Understanding and optimising the electoral participation of first time voters

First times are moments that many never forget. According to Bruter and Harrison (2017), 73% of British people, 82% of Americans, and 90% of South Africans remember their first vote. The existing literature has also confirmed the long-term importance of that first electoral experience. Butler and Stokes (1971) showed that electoral choice in the first two elections largely determines future vote. Franklin (2004) and Coppock and Green's (2016) works show how turnout at the first opportunity may start a habituation process. Lodge, Gottfried at al. (2014) and Bruter and Harrison (2017) go even further and find that voting in the first two elections of their lives will likely make citizens regular participants, whilst abstaining in both may lead them to become chronic abstentionists instead. First elections thus determine likely electoral turnout and behaviour for much of people's lives, and First and Foremost dedicates systematic attention to the way new voters experience them, the psychological, institutional, and political determinants of their behaviour, and potential institutional responses.

First and Foremost is a fully piloted empirical comparative project based on mixed quantitative and qualitative methods which focuses on characterising the experience of citizens' first vote, understanding the psychological, institutional, and contextual factors that impede or improve their likely participation, satisfaction, and likelihood to participate in future elections. We also assess how Election Management Bodies can use the opportunity of this first vote to improve potential first time voters' engagement and satisfaction notably by experimentally testing very specific instruments directed at first time voters. The project features a unique collaboration with Election Management Bodies in the UK, Australia, South Africa, France and the USA to ensure the highest level of impact of our proposed work.

At the heart of our model is the idea that whilst youth participation is a challenge, a citizen's first vote is also a unique opportunity. We use psychological research on other 'first times' - from sexuality to alcohol and parenthood - to understand how the first time dynamics can be best adapted to the question of the first vote.

The project will answer the following research question: How is a young person's first election experienced, what are the personal, institutional, and contextual determinants of potential first time voters' emotions, attitudes (satisfaction with the electoral process, efficacy, alienation), and turnout in their first and subsequently second election? It relies on four methodological elements: 1) a panel-study survey of people reaching electoral franchise for the first time, 2) focus groups, 3) election diaries, and 4) experiments and field experiments on the impact of measures aimed to make a first election special and successful.

The project makes impact a priority, predominantly focusing on three key avenues to translate our research findings into political solutions and engage users with our research from its conception and organisation to the implementation of its most important findings: collaboration with leading Electoral Commissions/Election Management Bodies as well as Inter-Governmental Organisations involved in the support for electoral democracy; collaboration with think tanks which are concerned with youth engagement and participation; collaboration with leading media outlets with a strong audience amongst young citizens.

First and Foremost is a project explicitly built around the need to answer a fundamental societal challenge: How can we optimise the first electoral experience of young voters in order to improve the quality of, satisfaction, and engagement of young citizens with electoral democracy. Young people have often been identified as one of the groups most alienated by the functioning of contemporary democratic systems, included by Election Management Bodies who have identified first time voters as their top target in a survey that we conducted on behalf of the Electoral Stakeholders Network. Consequently, our project aims to allow nations to improve this situation and bring young people in the electoral democratic process from the very beginning in order to create positive electoral habituation. This objective is doubly supported by a systematic knowledge exchange plan involving key decision makers and institutions, and an equally ambitious users engagement plan which will equip civil society organisations and groups of young people themselves with the knowledge that we will have created to enable them to directly weigh in the debate for the improvement of their first electoral experience.
To achieve this goal, we have made impact a priority, predominantly focusing on three key avenues to translate our research findings into political solutions and engage users with our research from its conception and organisation to the implementation of its most important findings:

- Collaboration with leading Electoral Commissions/Election Management Bodies as well as Inter-Governmental Organisations involved in the support for electoral democracy;
- Collaboration with think tanks which are concerned with youth engagement and participation;
- Collaboration with leading media outlets with a strong audience amongst young citizens.

This will come in addition to an ambitious academic impact plan

The impact plan uses our unique links with leading Election Management Bodies, IGOs, Think Tanks, and media group Vice to organise our impact, associated all users categories at every stage of the project from conception (notably through membership of the Advisory Board) to fieldwork (field experiments), dissemination (specialised workshops) and adaptation of our findings into specific policy solutions.