Foreclosure Depresses Voter Turnout

From the press release:

California neighborhoods reeling from record foreclosures also experienced lower levels of voter turnout in the 2008 presidential election, according to researchers at the University of California, Riverside.

Voters who lost their homes were not the only ones who appear to have been affected, sociologist Vanesa Estrada-Correa and political scientist Martin Johnson determined in a study believed to be the first to assess the effect of foreclosure on political participation. Voters who remained in neighborhoods impacted by foreclosure were less likely to vote than individuals in more stable communities, the researchers discovered.

The findings of Estrada-Correa and Johnson appear in “Foreclosure Depresses Voter Turnout: Neighborhood Disruption and the 2008 Presidential Election in California,” published in the peer-reviewed journal Social Science Quarterly and available online.  The journal is published by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

Nationally more than 3.5 million families were dislocated by foreclosures in 2008. In California, nearly 641,000 homes were lost to foreclosure between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2011. Communities in the Inland Empire in Southern California and the Central Valley were hit especially hard. People of color and low-income homeowners were more likely to experience foreclosure.

Source: University of California, news

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