Your vote matters, having a say within the nation you are a citizen of is our fundamental human right, because one way or another everyone is affected by the choices made by politicians that has been voted to make the changes in your nation. Voting is a form of investment for all, but for young people especially, in terms of future changes, like action for climate change.
Figure 1: The graph demonstrating the voter turnouts of different age group from 2015-2019 (British Election study, 2021)
However, here in these statistics from the British Election Study, shows the turnout of different age group’s votes, and one thing that is clear is that there is less than 60% turnout from 18-24- and 25–34-year-olds, whereas the older generation has the highest, although their turnout has also decreased by 2019. A majority of young people must vote for them to be represented in order to call our nation a democratic nation.
Why are young people not politically engaged?
Looking at this data we may all think, why are young people not politically engaged, is it because they are uncaring to vote, or is the lack of knowledge or the lack of access to the information? For instance, politicians can lack clarity among the different political parties, resulting in a struggle of differentiating the parties and seeing them all as one. This is also rooted in the less political and citizenship education we get from a young age. There are ways of schools educating young people and engaging them with politics and citizenship, as it is compulsory in the national curriculum for 11 to 16-year-olds in some schools, for instance through special designated classes, or political activities within schools engaging students like school councils debating clubs and possible mock elections. One thing I remember from my secondary school is back in 2016, my secondary school also held a mock Brexit referendum, we were all just given a sheet to mark non-Brexit or Brexit, and this was compulsory to vote, looking back then I was not interested in it as I did not actually have the knowledge of it, I had voted not knowing what I was voting for and what it meant to choose one side. Do you remember receiving any active citizenship education from your educational institution, do you think it was effective for you?
However, the limitation on this is the level of value and quality of the political and citizen education a school provides, this can defer from school to school but especially among public, private, and grammar schools. This is where socioeconomic inequalities come into play, by this we can assume that young people who are economically disadvantaged may not be getting the same amount of citizenship education. This can be due to less money being spent by the educational institution on this matter, which can also be stemmed from the thought that it is not as much of an important matter, whereas in a private school, it will be vice versa. How many politicians do we see from a socioeconomically disadvantaged background?
This also relates to the lack of representation young people may see with politicians in terms of socioeconomic positions. According to the Guardian (2022), a new study reveals a rising “representation gap” in parliament and estimates that only 1% of the current conservative MPs joined from a working-class position. Altogether, 7% of all MPs are classified as “working class”, compared to 34% of all UK citizens who are working age. While 13% of Labour MPs entered politics after holding a job associated with the working class, that number decreased by 50% during the 1980s. More importantly, the lack of representation of younger people in politics, according to Un Youth, only 1.6% of MPs are under the age of 30, despite the fact that the age group of 15-24 makes up one-sixth of the global population and around one-third of nations, eligibility form parliamentarians begin at 25. A lack of representation can also put young people off from voting and make them feel as though they are the last group that politicians want to communicate to because they simply lost faith in this political system or never had it in the first place. Thus, they do not think the major political figures comprehend the issues that most directly touch them.
What is the possible solution?
Alongside enhancing the education curriculum of political engagement with school, another solution that has been brought up for this is making voting compulsory for first-time voters, meaning anyone who does not vote will face a fine. This is believed that it will make young people adopt a habit of voting and being politically engaged, but there are obvious limitations to this, like people voting for a random party just to skip a fine, without clearly knowing what that party has to offer to the younger population, there is also another reason why people don’t vote and that is people might not feel like any of the available parties are representing their values, and so prefer not to vote for anyone.
Digital Active Citizenship?
So, we cannot just assume that young people are uncaring about what is going on around them, as when we look online we will see that young people are passionate about social action, they are involved with campaigning online. This is the involvement of digital active citizenship.
“Participation in social media leads to an engagement with the external world and with other; it leads to position taking vis-à-vis issues that can also be political” (Siapera, 2018:62)
Young people claim that political activism on social media has its benefits, but not all young people participate and gain these benefits equally (Booth et al., 2020).
More specifically, there are other widely used online tools like Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) that can assist voters in comparing their preferred policy stances on important matters with the positions of political parties and candidates.
References
Booth, R.B., Tombaugh, E., Kiesa, A., Lundberg, K. and Cohen, A. (2020). Young People Turn to Online Political Engagement During COVID-19. [online] circle.tufts.edu. Available at: https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/young-people-turn-online-political-engagement-during-covid-19 [Accessed 15 Mar. 2023].
British Election Study. (2021). Age and voting behaviour at the 2019 General Election – The British Election Study. [online] Available at: https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/age-and-voting-behaviour-at-the-2019-general-election/#.ZBMJwnbP23C [Accessed 14 Mar. 2023].
Siapera, E. (2018). Understanding New Media. 2nd ed. Sage Publications LTD, p.62.
The Guardian. (2022). Just one in 100 Tory MPs came from a working-class job, new study shows. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/24/just-one-in-100-tory-mps-came-from-a-working-class-job-new-study-shows. (Accessed 15 Mar. 2022)