A Georgetown University graduate student in the economics department won a university prize for his research on voter turnout in U.S. elections.

Luke Miller, an economics doctoral candidate, won the 30th Razin Prize for his research paper on voter mobilization and turnout in U.S. elections. The annual award was established in honor of Ofair Razin (GRD ʼ96), a student who passed away during his studies and was awarded his doctoral degree posthumously. 

Miller said he was grateful to receive the recognition, as it reflects his work on the research project.

“It’s great to see so much hard work paying off, after spending so many hours working on this paper,” Miller told The Hoya. 

The award was presented by the economics department and the Georgetown Center for Economic Research to the best thesis or paper written by an advanced graduate student each year.

Miller’s research focuses on developing a model to understand what motivates U.S. citizens to vote.

Laurent Bouton, an economics professor and one of Miller’s advisors, said Miller’s research offers a new methodological approach to investigating voter turnout.

“Luke’s work provides both new empirical evidence and a methodological framework that future researchers can build on,” Bouton wrote to The Hoya. “Substantively, it helps clarify the relative importance of voter motivation and campaign mobilization in driving voter turnout, an issue that has been debated for decades.”

Miller said his research examines how different electoral reforms in the United States could impact voter turnout and campaign mobilization techniques.

“There’s been a lot of different proposals to the electoral systems,” Miller said. “A lot of people say it would be better if we move from the Electoral College to the national popular vote. Or people will say, ‘We need to implement different campaign finance laws.’ But we don’t really have a good understanding of how that affects the equilibrium, how that affects turnout, how that affects candidates.”

According to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, over 63% of Americans said they would like presidential elections to select the president by popular vote instead of using the Electoral College.

Miller said he is researching how voters respond to changes to elections.

“I’m trying to specifically model elections, taking into account both how voters and campaigns respond to these changes, so a better understanding of the effects of these reforms,” Miller said. 

Miller’s research examines the pivotability of voters, which indicates voters’ decision-making based on the power of their vote in influencing the election. It also looks at campaign effort on voting behavior, which previous studies have not considered.

Bouton said these concepts require further study.

“Despite decades of research, there is still no consensus on why people vote or how voter behavior should be modeled,” Bouton wrote.

“While most existing research studies these mechanisms separately, in reality they interact,” Bouton added.

2025 findings from the Pew Research Center indicate that voter turnout for the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections was among the highest voter turnout rates in the past century. 

Juan Felipe Riaño, an assistant economics professor and one of Miller’s advisors, said Miller’s project allows future researchers to evaluate legislative impacts. 

“The framework that Luke has built is essentially a laboratory for testing policy scenarios that would be impossible to run as real-world experiments,” Felipe Riaño wrote to The Hoya. “Future researchers can use it to simulate how changes to voting laws, spending caps or resource allocation rules would ripple through both campaign strategy and voter behavior.”

Felipe Riaño said Miller initially used data from congressional elections, but later shifted his focus to data from presidential elections.

“The project grew out of an earlier collaboration with a fellow doctoral student, in which Luke compared several leading theories of why people vote using data from congressional and state special elections,” Felipe Riaño wrote. “That work gave him deep familiarity with the theoretical landscape and the computational demands of structural estimation.”

“But he recognized that presidential elections, where campaign strategy is most visible and the stakes are the highest, offered a more compelling setting to push the research further,” Felipe Riaño added.

Miller said he hopes future research continues to explore the interactions between voters and candidates to better understand voter turnout.

“You need to treat both voters and candidates as the strategic agents,” Miller said. “So both of them, they’re trying to maximize the probability they win. Voters themselves can be influenced by candidates, but they’re strategically deciding whether or not to turn out. So if you want to have a model to understand these electoral reforms, I think the main takeaway is that you need to be modeling these interactions between these agents.”