Between the late 1960s and early 1980s, state and federal lawmakers made a number of unprecedented changes to the minimum age laws that define the legal boundaries between childhood and adulthood in the United States. By altering the voting age and the legal age of majority during the early 1970s, legislators effectively lowered the legal age of adulthood from twenty-one to eighteen, and launched a broader, more wide-ranging debate over other minimum age laws that would preoccupy legislators for much of the decade that followed. These reforms can be grouped into two distinct stages. Early 1970s reforms to the voting age and age of majority placed a great deal of faith in eighteen- to twenty-year-old Americans’ ability to make mature, responsible decisions for themselves, and marked a significant departure from the traditional practice of treating young people as legal adults at the age of twenty-one. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, a second set of reforms revoked much of the faith that legislators had placed in the nation’s young people, raising some key minimum age limits – such as the drinking age – and expanding adults’ ability to supervise and control teenaged youth. This dissertation analyzes political and public debates over the legal boundaries between childhood and adulthood during the 1970s, focusing in particular on reforms to the voting age, the age of majority, the drinking age, and the minimum age laws that regulate teenagers’ sexuality. It seeks to explain how and why American lawmakers chose to alter these minimum age laws during the 1970s, and how they decided which age should be the threshold for granting young people specific adult rights and responsibilities. The dissertation suggests that legislators often had difficulty accessing information and expertise that they could use to make well-informed, authoritative decisions on the subject of minimum age laws. Instead, they often based their choices on broader public images and perceptions of the nation’s young people, and on their subjective experiences of interacting with American youth. Throughout the 1970s, a wide range of lawmakers, activists, and interest groups – including many young people – sought to control the legal boundaries between childhood and adulthood, both by lobbying lawmakers directly and by trying to alter public images and perceptions of the nation’s youth. During the early 1970s, some young activists, liberal lawmakers, and interest groups met with considerable success in their attempts to grant young people greater adult rights and responsibilities at earlier ages, successfully framing eighteen- to twenty-year-old youth as mature, responsible young people who were quite capable of shouldering adult rights and duties. But these positive perceptions of young people were short-lived. By the mid-1970s, they were being supplanted by much more negative and unsettling images of young people who were thought to be exhibiting “adult” behaviors too soon, and were portrayed as being both in danger and a danger to American society. As a result, lawmakers became increasingly focused on protecting and controlling young people in their late teens and early twenties, and on drawing clear, firm boundaries between childhood and adulthood. These shifts demonstrate that images and perceptions of American youth played a key role in shaping 1970s reforms to the legal boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Rather than the product of a sober, careful evaluation of young Americans’ capacity to make responsible decisions for themselves, these reforms were often the product of adult Americans’ visceral, emotional responses to shifting public perceptions of the nation’s youth. / History

Ratification of the 26th Amendment in 1971 was a watershed event in America's long and often tumultuous electoral reform journey. The persistently low voter turnout of newly enfranchised 18-20 year-olds since then not only is troubling from a democratic perspective but also is puzzling in light of the rapidly rising educational attainment of this age group during the same period. In this investigation, I develop an original theoretical frame by which to examine relationships between the 1972-2006 voter turnout patterns of 26th Amendment eligible voters and a large complement of educational and non-educational influences manifested during the end of high school and the years immediately following high school. Drawing upon multiple data sources, including a greatly under-utilized national survey series that is maintained under National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) auspices, I reaffirm the overall strength of educational attainment as a young adult voter turnout predictor while providing new evidence that attainment effects are attenuated by other educational and non-educational circumstances and traits. My results, which also reveal the dynamism of these influences in predicting young adult voter turnout, are suggestive of five areas in which the 26th Amendment can serve as a teachable moment to strengthen the democratic education mission through: (1) expanded post-high school enrollment opportunities; (2) energized high school citizenship training; (3) strengthened connections between the high school literacy and civics curricula; (4) improved use of technology to deliver civically relevant messages; and (5) more aggressive voter registration efforts on high school and college campuses.

At what age people ought to be given the right to vote has become a salient issue in both contemporary Western politics and political science. A prevalent argument opposing lowering the voting age to 16 asserts that 16- and 17-year-olds lack the necessary political competence required of voters. However, the validity of this argument rests upon the assumption that adolescents do not attain the required competence upon enfranchisement. While the idea that political competence improves when given the vote can be traced back to 19th century political theory, empirical investigations of this claim remain scarce. In this thesis, I address this gap in the literature by applying a regression discontinuity (RD) design using eligibility to vote as the cut-off. By surveying the political theory regarding requirements for voting rights, I identify political knowledge and communicative skills as the most relevant competencies. No effect of being eligible to vote can be found on the former, while the results concerning communicative skills are inconclusive and sensitive to model specifications. These findings are consistent with previous RD-studies within this field: gaining the right to vote does not seem to have a significant effect on political knowledge. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion on the age of enfranchisement.

Essay 1 (with Oskar Nordström Skans): This paper provides field evidence on the causal impact of past successes on future performances. Since persistence in success or failure is likely to be linked through, potentially time-varying, ability it is intrinsically difficult to identify the causal effect of succeeding on the probability of performing well in the future. We therefore employ a regression discontinuity design on data from professional golf tournaments exploiting that almost equally skilled players are separated into successes and failures half-way into the tournaments (the “cut”). We show that players who (marginally) succeeded in making the cut substantially increased their performance in subsequent tournaments relative to players who (marginally) failed to make the cut. This success-effect is substantially larger when the subsequent (outcome) tournament involves more prize money. The results therefore suggest that past successes provide an important prerequisite when performing high-stakes tasks. Essay 2: Recent experimental evidence suggests that women in general are more discouraged than men by failures which potentially can explain why women, on average, are less likely than men to reach top-positions in firms. This paper provides the first quasi-experimental evidence from the field on this issue using data from all-female and all-male professional golf tournaments to see if this result can be replicated among competitive men and women. These top-performing men and women are active in an environment with multiple rounds of competition and the institutional set-up of the tournaments makes it possible to causally estimate the effect of the result in one tournament on the performance in the next. The results show that both male and female golfers respond negatively to a failure and that their responses are virtually identical. This finding suggests that women’s difficulties in reaching top-positions in firms are caused by external rather than internal barriers. Essay 3: Voting is a fundamental human right. Yet, individuals that are younger than 18 do typically not have this right since they are considered uninformed. However, recent evidence tentatively suggests that the political knowledge of youths is endogenous to the voting age. I test for the existence of such dynamic adjustments utilizing voting age discontinuities caused by Swedish laws. I employ a regression discontinuity strategy on Swedish register data to estimate the causal effect of early age voting right on political knowledge around age 18. The results do not support the existence of positive causal effects of early age voting right on political knowledge. Thus, we should not expect that 16-year-olds respond by acquiring more political knowledge if they are given the right to vote. This finding weakens the case for a lowering of the voting age from 18 to 16. Essay 4 (with Lena Hensvik): We postulate that firms’ production losses  from absence depend on the employees’ internal substitutability, incentivizing firms to keep absence low in positions with few substitutes. Using Swedish employer-employee data we show that absence is substantially lower in such positions even conditional on establishment and occupation fixed effects. The result reflects sorting on both entry and exit margins, with stronger separations responses when it was difficult to predict the absence of the employees beforehand. These findings highlight that internal substitution insures firms against production disruptions caused by absence and that absence costs are important aspects of firms’ hiring and separations decisions.