Young voters who for so long have felt disconnected from politics are finally starting to take their future into their own hands. The days of them sitting idle and letting the older generations with long term devotions to certain parties sway the elections are slowly coming to an end. For a long time, young people have been disengaged with politics. Norris, 2003 suggests that “political disengagement is thought to affect all citizens but young people are believed to be particularly disillusioned about the major institutions of representative democracy, leaving them apathetic (at best) or alienated (at worst).” But the 2017 general election showed a sudden influx of young people participating which was described as a “youthquake” (Travis, 2017). So what caused this spike in the number of young people actively coming forward to the ballot boxes?

Looking back to 1992, the voting gap between those aged 18-24 and those aged 65+ was as low as 12 percent, with a total of 63 percent of 18-24 year olds voting. Coming to 2015 the gap increased by a colossal amount with only 43 percent of 18-24 year olds voting compared to 78 percent of people aged 65+ (Barford, 2017). The 2017 election saw a significant increase of 18-24 year olds who voted; up 21 percent compared to 2015 meaning a total of 64 percent! (Sloam and Ehsan, 2017). With such an increase in the number of people aged 18-24 coming out to vote, something must have changed to change many non-voting young peoples’ minds.

Figure 1 – Graph from (Sloam and Ehsan, 2017).

Jeremy Corbyn and the labour party ran an exceptional campaign in 2017. Rather than trying to reach the older generations which are far more likely to have allegiances with parties (Sloam, 2007), they came up with an  idea of appealing to the younger voters instead. The campaign supported by Momentum took to social media, calling on the youth of the country to get out and vote Labour. Amongst large social media coverage, Jeremy Corbyn also went viral due to celebrity endorsement and a bizarre “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant which spread across the country. Young people who didn’t even have any interest in politics whatsoever still couldn’t keep the labour party leader’s name out of their mouths! Videos emerged of Jeremy Corbyn on stage with UK Rap artists, with other artists such as JME going out for brunch with him. This painted Jeremy Corbyn as a man who cared for the youth of this country, and he caused a sway in emotions, finally leading so many young people to reengage with politics and have hope and faith in a potential government.

Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

The success of this campaign is easily notable by observing the number of young people who actually came out to vote labour. 62 percent of the young voters aged from 18 to 24 voted labour in comparison with only 27 percent voting conservative. Although these figures are to be taken with a pinch of salt as it could also be possible that this might have occurred due to the youth protesting against the political establishment in general. Young people may have voted labour not because of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign but because the Labour policies were the ones which were mostly aimed at young people. This is not to say that the other parties did not also include policies which were of benefit to young people. Furthermore there was also much disillusionment with the Conservative party following on from the Brexit vote the year before (Sloam and Ehsan, 2017). However, it is no to be denied that the social media campaign was without effect. Pickard, 2017 states “The appeal of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party in the 2017 General Election among many young people is largely attributable to the leader being viewed as an authentic and ideological politician with a positive and hopeful message, as well as youth-friendly policies, as opposed to Conservative Party.” This view of Jeremy Corbyn was spread like wildfire on social platforms, so there is no denying that it definitely boosted the number of people who were to vote for him.

Figure 2 – Graph from (Sloam and Ehsan, 2017)

The graph above shows it is clear that the Labour party did something correct. The number of young people who voted labour is seen as the cause for the Conservative party losing their majority and having to give up some seats in parliament. “Labour’s successful push to get out the youth vote was a decisive factor in some seats, although there is still some debate about the size of the surge in voting among 18 to 24-year-olds.” (Hunt and Wheeler, 2017). With a 21 percent increase in the 18-24 age group, I think it is clear that the surge was very real, and this very surge may carry on into the next election, posing real value to whichever party can get them on their side. I think we will see the next election focusing a lot more on the youth vote than before.

What are your thoughts?

 

 

References

Barford, V. (2017). If young people voted bigly, would it change everything?. [online] BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-39965925 [Accessed 20 Feb. 2019].

Hunt, A. and Wheeler, B. (2017). 10 ways the PM blew her majority. [online] BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-40237833 [Accessed 20 Feb. 2019].

Ipsos Mori (2015) How Britain Voted in 2015. [online]  Available at https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2015 [accessed 20 Feb. 2019]

Norris, P. (2003) ‘Young People and Political Activism: From the Politics of Loyalties to the Politics of Choice?’. Paper presented to the Council of Europe Symposium, Young People and Democratic Institutions: From Disillusionment to Participation, Strasbourg, 27th – 28th November 2003

Pickard, S. (2017) How Momentum got Britain’s youth interested in politics. [online]   available at http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/how-momentum-got-young-people-interested-in-formal-politics/ [accessed 20 Feb. 2018]

Sloam, J. (2007) Rebooting Democracy: Youth Participation in Politics in the UK in Parliamentary Affairs, volume 60, no. 4, pp. 548-567

Sloam, J. and Ehsan, M. R. (2017) Youth Quake: Young People and the 2017 General Election. [online] Available at: https://moodle.roehampton.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/734808/mod_resource/content/1/Youth-Quake_Final.pdf [Accessed 20 Feb. 2019]

Travis, A. (2017). The youth for today: how the 2017 election changed the political landscape. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/09/corbyn-may-young-voters-labour-surge [Accessed 20 Feb. 2019].