The best hope for the future are turning off politics
According to John F. Kennedy, ‘Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future’. If this is the case, then no one has told the politicians of today. In 2019, only 47 percent of the 18-24 age group voted, and even in 2017, when the youth vote was held to be significant, it was only 54 percent compared with 71 percent of those aged over 65. To be fair it’s not a new problem and youth turnout has often been lower than that of other demographic groups, but it they don’t get out and vote, there is less chance of young people being represented.
As George Monbiot puts it, ‘one of the biggest political problems we face is older people tend to vote and younger people vote much less.’ And given the changes to registration processes making it an individual responsibility to register to vote and the new requirement for the kind of voter ID older adults are more likely to hold when actually voting, youth turnout is likely to get worse (Alonso-Curbelo, 2023). The question is why is this a problem, and if it is a problem, how can we solve it.
Why is this a problem?
Put simply, if a group of people don’t vote governments are emboldened to ignore the needs of younger voters while protecting those that do vote (Putnam, 1995). This isn’t an attack on the rights of the retired to enjoy their triple-locked pensions, heating allowances and housing. They’ve worked hard all their lives and they deserve them (Sloan, 2020). Apart from anything else, most young people (like myself) will surely be glad that society looks after its pensioners when they eventually reach that age.
But it does mean that the youth are increasingly being asked to shoulder a higher burden of costs while being shutout from all the benefits that previous generations took for granted. Young people are shut out from lots of the benefits previous generations enjoyed. We’re shut out of the housing market, told to get a university degree to increase our earnings, but only if we take out a loan with higher interest rates than some mortgages that most of us will never repay (Erdmann, 2019; Callender and Mason, 2017). At the same time, MPs who went to university for free happily vote themselves pay rise after pay rise because they know the youth will never vote, and they can be ignored (Ignazi and Fiorelli, 2022).
This isn’t just about frustration about not having a bigger slice of the pie. Young people are reported to be much more concerned about issues such as climate change than the older generation, and this concern isn’t being met as fast as it could.Young people feel a sense of urgency in the challenges faced by increasing global temperatures and increased rate of extreme weather, but the government is failing to meet its targets. This intransigence then feeds into a lack of engagement with politics in that people don’t want to vote because they feel that it won’t do any good precisely because the government is not responding to this issue
It isn’t just the fact that politicians feel emboldened to ignore younger voters and focus upon the issues of the older generation. Demographically, the support for parties changes according to age, and this has the effect that parties supported by younger voters don’t get a look in. As you can see in the following graph, until you get to 50-year old voters, support for the Conservative party doesn’t get over 50 percent.
So, essentially, it is those over 50 who are calling all the shots. When you take into account that the population of the UK aged between 18 and 50 is 35.9 million and the population over 50 is only 24.6 million, most of the population are experiencing a government only preferred by the older age group (ONS, 2022). This is even shown in the Brexit referendum, in which young people’s wishes to stay in the European Union were not strong enough to balance out the fervent wishes of the older generation to leave (Harrison, 2018).
What is to be done?
So, a pattern has been created where the Westminster government ignores the wishes of young people, which then creates a situation in which young people don’t vote because they feel ignored. It’s simplistic to state that people should simply get out and vote, although that might help. One response might be to lower the voting age. This has been argued to have a positive impact in Scotland, where the voting age is 16 for the Scottish Parliament and local government elections. However, it has also been argued that the effect of this change only lasts a few years (Franklin, 2020).
An alternative approach is to increase civic engagement through teaching politics and debate in schools. There is some evidence that shows that where civic education takes place, young people are more likely to vote and will engage in politics more generally (Hoskins and Janmaat, 2019). However, this is not a central feature of education in British schools, and with educational budgets constantly under threat and demands placed upon pupils for engagement at all levels of school life, a new subject might be a step too far (Singh, 2021). Nevertheless, it remains a solution that has the best chance of succeeding (Sloam et al. 2021).
Citizenship education, civic engagement = increased turnout
Low turnout is not just a problem in itself, it’s a symptom of wider disengagement amongst young voters (Hoskins and Janmaat, 2019). Citizenship education gives young people the knowledge and skills with which they can understand, challenge and engage with democratic society, develop self-confidence and agency, and make a positive contribution to society. It offers benefits for more than just the individual being educated, providing the tools for greater community engagement (Hoskins and Janmaat, 2019). Overall, it represents the best change for young people to break the cycle of engagement and see not only what they can do for their country but also increase their willingness to tell the country what it can do for them
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References:
Alonso-Curbelo, A. (2023). The Voter ID Debate: An Analysis of Political Elite Framing in the UK Parliament. Parliamentary Affairs, 76(1), pp.62-84.
Callender, C., and Mason, G. (2017). Does student loan debt deter higher education participation? New evidence from England. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 671(1), pp.20-48.
Erdmann, K. (2019). Shut out: how a housing shortage caused the great recession and crippled our economy. London: Rowman and Littlefield.
Franklin, M. N. (2020). Consequences of lowering the voting age to 16: Lessons from comparative research. In J. Eichhorn and J. Bergh (eds.) Lowering the Voting Age to 16. Palgrave Studies in Young People and Politics. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.13-41.
Harrison, S. (2018). Young voters. Parliamentary Affairs, 71(suppl_1), pp.255-266.
Hoskins, B., and Janmaat, J. G. (2019). Education, democracy and inequality: Political engagement and citizenship education in Europe. Cham: Springer.
Ignazi, P., and Fiorelli, C. (2022). The End of Cornucopia: Party Financing after the Great Recession. Government and Opposition, 57(2), pp.193-216.
LSE (2019). Young cosmopolitans and the deepening of the intergenerational divide following the 2019 general election. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/young-cosmopolitans-and-ge2019/ [retrieved 22nd March, 2023].
ONS (2022). Population and household estimates, England and Wales: Census 2021, unrounded datahttps://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/populationandhouseholdestimatesenglandandwales/census2021unroundeddata[retrieved 22nd March, 2023].
Pickard, S (2015) Trying to Turn up the Turnout: Youth Wings and the Youth Vote in the 2015 General Election. Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique XX-3, pp.1-20 https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.503
Putnam, R. D. (1995). Why bother? Rethinking participation in elections and democracy. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), pp.65-78.
Sloan, B. (2020). Solidarity Across Generations in England and Wales, New York: Springer International Publishing.
Sloam, J., Kisby, B., Henn, M., and Oldfield, B. (2021). Voice, equality and education: the role of higher education in defining the political participation of young Europeans. Comparative European Politics, 19(3), pp.296-322
Singh, R. (2021). An Updated Evaluation of the Provision, Practice and Politics of Democratic Education in English Secondary Schools https://www.teachingtimes.com/an-updated-evaluation-of-the-provision-practice-and-politics-of-democratic-education-in-english-secondary-schools/ [retrieved 22nd March, 2023].