I picked up a lot of new habits over the past year. With the pandemic scrambling “life as usual,” everything from how I eat, sleep, and exercise to how I work, relax, and socialize looks different these days. It’s an open question to what extent this new way of life will stick once the world recovers from the COVID-19 crisis. I’d love to hold onto new rituals like daily runs on weekday afternoons or video calls with family on Sundays. My nighttime Netflix watching? I’m less keen to hold onto that.

One behavior that millions of Americans picked up during the pandemic would have far bigger consequences if it were to become habitual — voting. The 2020 election brought voter turnout in the United States to its highest level in decades, with a record number of first-time voters casting ballots. Whether or not this level of participation marks a temporary blip or the beginning of a new trend will dictate the course of elections for a generation.

It’s conventional wisdom among researchers studying patterns of civic engagement that voting is a “habit forming” behavior — whether or not someone voted in previous elections is a reliable predictor of whether or not they will vote in the next one. But we shouldn’t assume that all of the new voters in 2020 will automatically form enduring voting habits — not least of all because those with the power to shape the choice architecture of American civic life are actively working to prevent it. We have a big opportunity to make sure Americans who newly joined the electorate in 2020 become lifetime voters instead of one-time voters, and we can turn to four principles of habit formation (and disruption) to understand how to seize it to foster a culture of civic participation, and with it a more representative democracy.

Read the full article about making voting a habit by Tom Tasche at ideas42.