Politics can be stressful, but voting may help you live longer

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As millions of Americans vote in the midterm elections, a first-of-its-kind study suggests that voting may accomplish more than fulfillment of your civic duty — it may also indirectly reduce your risk of dying early from any cause.

Voting in the 2008 and 2012 US presidential elections was associated with roughly a 26% and 32% lower risk of premature death by 2023, respectively, according to the study published in March in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B. Its most comprehensive findings are based on the health and objective voting data for about 4,200 older adults from Wisconsin.

“You should vote as a civic duty, but doing your civic duty actually has benefits,” said first study author Dr. Femida Handy, who focuses on philanthropy as a professor in the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. “Understand voting as not being a magic pill that’s going to make life longer, but it raises the possibility that it provides some certain psychological benefits.”

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Happiness , altruism , optimism , social connection and a sense of belonging and purpose all have been linked with longevity in previous studies. And the American Medical Association has acknowledged voting as a social determinant of health.

The little prior research on any sort of relationship between voting in the United States and living longer largely examined how health status might predict later voting behaviors, Handy said. Or studies looking into how voting may predict future health outcomes relied on self-reported voting information, whereas the current research used verified records from Catalist, a national voter file database.

The study by Handy and her coauthor, social psychologist Dr. Sara Konrath, cannot prove that voting led participants to live longer. Those with lower early death risk were also more likely to be women and younger, and to have more financial and health resources.

The participants, most of whom were White, were part of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study , a long-term health and social sciences study of more than 10,300 people who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. By 2023, the last year that the authors of the new research collected mortality data, the participants were 84 years old on average.

People who voted in 2008 had a 45%, 37% and 29% lower risk of early death after five, 10 and 15 years, respectively — regardless of whether they voted remotely or in person, though the latter typically had a slight advantage. The researchers also found that while voting in 2012 carried a 32% lower risk of early death, participating in the 2004 election was not associated with lower or higher odds — and the reason why is unclear.

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These findings generally stood regardless of political affiliation, financial resources and the health measures the authors accounted for — which included smoking, alcohol consumption, functional limitations, vision, hearing, speech, pain, emotional well-being and memory. The researchers didn’t have details on participants’ disease status, physical activity, diet or sleep, but the measures they did use “correlate very highly in other research with objective health outcomes,” Handy said.

Any connection between voting and longevity would be due to other factors attendant to the act, said Dr. Benjamin A. Rein, clinical assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Buffalo in Buffalo, New York.

“There’s something about a will to be alive that keeps people alive,” added Rein, who wasn’t involved in the study and is the author of “ Why Brains Need Friends : The Neuroscience of Social Connection.” Someone may not vote unless they see themselves in the future, one they want to help shape, Rein said.

And “even voting remotely, you feel like you’re part of a group. You’re important. You have agency,” Handy said.

“All of that will tell me that you will do better off than somebody who says, ‘I’m not voting because I don’t believe in it,’” Handy added. “They’re not prosocial.” And that attitude may be present in other areas of their life as well.

Since the study consists of people from Wisconsin, there may have been key local issues that motivated their electoral participation or had some relationship to their health, Rein added — which may factor into the lack of associations between mortality and voting in 2004.

The geographic and racial limitations of the study also mean it’s unknown what the results of similar research on people of other races, ethnicities and locations would be — often critical factors in one’s relationship to politics, whether the individual is prosocial or not.

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The exclusion of elections after 2012 was because the point at which the authors could obtain data on mortality risk up to 15 years later, as they did for the three elections, hasn’t yet arrived.

And it’s worth noting that 2008 “was a very different political atmosphere,” Rein said. “Now we’ve tied a lot more division to politics that could be unhealthy. And I’d be very curious to see if this result holds up with the 2020 election, for instance, or 2024.”

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在数百万美国人参加中期选举投票之际，一项史无前例的研究表明，投票不仅可以履行公民义务，还可以间接降低因任何原因过早死亡的风险。

根据3月份发表在《老年学杂志：B辑》上的一项研究，在2008年和2012年美国总统选举中投票分别与到2023年过早死亡的风险降低约26%和32%相关。该研究最全面的发现基于威斯康星州约4200名老年人的健康和客观投票数据。

“投票是公民的义务，但履行公民义务实际上有很多好处，”该研究的第一作者、宾夕法尼亚大学社会政策与实践学院的慈善事业教授费米达·汉迪博士说。“要明白投票并非延年益寿的灵丹妙药，但它确实有可能带来一些心理上的益处。”

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以往的研究表明，幸福感、利他主义、乐观精神、社会联系以及归属感和目标感都与长寿有关。美国医学会也已承认投票是影响健康的社会因素之一。

汉迪表示，此前关于美国投票与寿命长短之间关系的研究寥寥无几，而且大多只关注健康状况如何预测日后的投票行为。或者，那些研究投票如何预测未来健康状况的研究依赖于选民的自我报告，而目前的研究则使用了来自全国选民档案数据库Catalist的已核实记录。

汉迪及其合作者、社会心理学家萨拉·康拉特博士的研究无法证明投票能延长参与者的寿命。那些早逝风险较低的人也更有可能是女性、更年轻，并且拥有更多的经济和医疗资源。

参与者大多为白人，他们参与了威斯康星州纵向研究，这是一项针对 1957 年威斯康星州高中毕业生的 10300 多名学生的长期健康和社会科学研究。到 2023 年，也就是这项新研究的作者收集死亡率数据的最后一年，参与者的平均年龄为 84 岁。

2008年参与投票的人，在投票后5年、10年和15年内过早死亡的风险分别降低了45%、37%和29%——无论他们是远程投票还是亲自投票，尽管亲自投票通常略占优势。研究人员还发现，虽然2012年投票使过早死亡的风险降低了32%，但参与2004年选举与过早死亡风险的降低或升高并无关联——其原因尚不清楚。

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这些研究结果总体上不受政治倾向、经济资源以及作者所考虑的健康指标（包括吸烟、饮酒、功能障碍、视力、听力、语言能力、疼痛、情绪健康和记忆力）的影响。研究人员没有参与者疾病状况、身体活动、饮食或睡眠方面的详细信息，但他们使用的指标“在其他研究中与客观健康结果高度相关”，汉迪说道。

纽约州布法罗市布法罗大学精神病学系临床助理教授本杰明·A·雷恩博士表示，投票与寿命之间的任何联系都将是由于投票行为的其他因素造成的。

“求生本能是人们活下去的动力，”雷恩补充道。他并未参与这项研究，著有《大脑为何需要朋友：社交联系的神经科学》一书。雷恩表示，除非人们看到了自己的未来，看到了自己想要参与塑造的未来，否则他们可能不会去投票。

“即使是远程投票，你也会觉得自己是集体的一份子。你很重要。你有发言权，”汉迪说。

“所有这些都表明，你肯定比那些说‘我不投票，因为我不相信投票’的人要好得多，”汉迪补充道。“他们缺乏亲社会精神。”而且这种态度可能也体现在他们生活的其他方面。

雷恩补充说，由于这项研究的对象是威斯康星州的人，因此可能存在一些关键的当地问题促使他们参与选举，或者与他们的健康有一些关系——这可能是导致 2004 年死亡率与投票之间缺乏关联的原因之一。

该研究的地理和种族局限性也意味着，对其他种族、民族和地区的人们进行类似研究的结果如何，我们不得而知——这通常是影响一个人与政治关系的关键因素，无论这个人是亲社会的还是反社会的。

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对越来越多的家长来说，“拒绝接种疫苗”正在变成“延迟接种疫苗”，但这丝毫不减其危险性。

之所以排除 2012 年之后的选举，是因为作者们还没有像对前三次选举那样，获得长达 15 年的死亡风险数据。

值得注意的是，雷恩说，2008年的政治氛围“截然不同”。“现在，我们把更多的分裂与政治联系起来，这可能会造成不良后果。我很想知道，例如，在2020年或2024年的选举中，这一结果是否仍然成立。”

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