Photo/Illutration A family with a young child votes early in the July 10 Upper House election at a polling station in Nagakute, Aichi Prefecture, on July 2. (Toshinari Takahashi)

A new study details how younger generations ultimately hurt their own pocketbooks when they abstain from voting in elections.

And the final price tag might leave some with sticker shock.

Adults under 50 lose nearly 78,000 yen ($570) per year for every 1-percent drop in voter turnout among them in a national election, according to the study.

Hiroshi Yoshida, a professor of economics of aging at Tohoku University, crunched the numbers in June ahead of the July 10 Upper House election.

“It’s natural for politicians to prioritize policies for elderly people because they’re more likely to vote,” Yoshida said. “I hope the results of my study will help encourage younger generations to cast their ballots.”

In the study, Yoshida defined people under 50 as “younger generations” and those in their 50s and up as “older generations” and collected data on voter turnout among the two age groups in national elections from 1976 to 2019.

He found that turnout has been falling among both generations, but the drop was much steeper for the younger age cohort.

During that same period, the government was issuing more bonds, increasing the financial burden on future generations.

Yoshida then tested his theory that more government bonds would get issued when voter turnout remains low among younger generations. The results showed every 1-percent drop in turnout costs them an extra 47,480 yen each.

He also compared social security spending on the older and younger generations.

He found pensions and medical care expenditures for elderly people exceeded what was spent on younger people, including the child care allowance and subsidies related to childbearing.

The study showed the gap in social security spending between the two groups widens by 30,072 yen for every 1-percent decline in voter turnout among younger generations.

Yoshida concluded that every 1-percent drop in the turnout among the generations costs them a total of 77,552 yen a year.

He acknowledged that the estimate does not fully reflect the actual amount of their losses because he used only two kinds of data in the study: the issuance of government bonds and social security expenditures.

But he said he wanted to help increase voter turnout among younger people by showing the value of a vote in figures.

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