The Internet Generation: Engaged Citizens or Political Dropouts

4: Political Participation

4 Political Participation do young people still vote? I t’s time to get to the numbers: just how many young people vote? We have established that nowadays, for the most part, they turn out to vote at lower levels than did their parents and grandparents when they were young. While emerging generations appear to be more comfortable with less conventional forms, unconventional political activity is not filling the gap left by the decline in conventional forms of participation among younger citizens. Where substitution is taking place, as was suggested in chapter 1, it is among a small group of well-educated young citizens, not among the less educated—that is, the potential political dropouts. Moreover, in looking at the only apparent case of such substitution, Norway, we found voting being replaced less by protest behavior than by more direct, citizen-initiated activity that targets conventional parties and government agencies. Measuring and Comparing Turnout: Why and How Voting is a visible act, readily identifiable and quantifiable—an act for which we have objective as well as subjective measures. People who normally do not vote are highly unlikely to take part in more active forms of politics. Moreover, these more active forms of participation are, as a rule, limited to a minority of the population. For conventional forms of participation, this is clearly illustrated in table 4.1, which shows that though declining since the 1970s, average voter turnout is still about four times the average for other forms of conventional participation. A similar relationship appears when we compare turnout to unconventional forms. An analysis of the results of the 2003 European Social Survey (Milner 2009a) found that, respectively, 23.3, 14.5, and 8.5 percent of respondents reported having signed petitions, taken part in boycotts , and participated in demonstrations in the previous twelve months. 78 // citizens in the making In sum, alternate forms of political participation cannot expect to engage even a quarter of the potential participants, while elections can reasonably expect participation by three-quarters. If civic engagement is not to be restricted to a minority, political participation must be something open to and, under normal circumstances, practiced by the majority of the population. Under such circumstances in advanced democratic societies , voter turnout is the still the best thermometer we have to measure the health of the body politic. In addition, voter turnout is an objective indicator than can be operationalized for the purposes of international comparison. For political science, it provides the bedrock of relevant data, comparable to gross domestic product for economists, allowing for meaningful comparative research. Comparison is the sine qua non of meaningful analysis, allowing us to subject alternative approaches to the test of whether outcomes meet expectations. When it comes to political participation, as we noted, critics of studies using turnout and other conventional forms of participation have failed to produce a practical alternative indicator; their repertoire of reported unconventional forms of participation and conducive attitudes is not applicable to effective cross-national research. table 4.1 Conventional political participation (percent) vote in last general elections attend meeting or rally contact a politician belong to a political party country s  s  s  s  Austria         Germany         Italy    NA     Finland         Netherlands         United Kingdom         United States         Switzerland         source: Gallego 2007, 6. Data are derived from the Political Action Study and International Social Survey Program. Recent data for Italy are from the first wave of the European Social Survey. political participation // 79 Voter turnout, for all its limitations, does meet the necessary conditions. Ideally, we would like to be able to use comparable turnout data for a variety of legislative and administrative offices, but because of the unavailability of some of these data, cross-national research concentrates on voting for candidates for national legislative office. When we compute the average turnout in legislative elections in industrial democracies in the decades since World War II, we can see a pattern of overall decline since the end of the 1980s, following a stable period of consistently solid average turnout in the 1960s and 1970s (Ellis, Pammett, Gratschew, and Thiessen 2007). Using data on parliamentary turnout levels in the European countries and Canada, Siaroff (2007) calculated decade averages at 82 percent for both the 1970s and 1980s, declining to 76 percent in the 1990s, and 71 percent in the first half of the 2000s. When combined in table 4.1 with data on...