Why don't young adults vote in major elections?

April 27th, 2011 By Paul Fraumeni

OISE Professor Megan Boler thinks that may be changing.

As the federal election intensifies, you hear it time and time again - young adults, by and large, don’t vote.  Professor Megan Boler of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto has been examining this phenomenon and is exploring it in a new project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) — “Social Media in the Hands of Young Citizens: Evolving forms of participatory democracy.”  She thinks the tide may be turning on youth voting apathy.

What do you think of this phenomenon?

There are some misconceptions about the actual numbers.  Generally, based on statistics from 2008, we’re seeing in the headlines that only 37 per cent of youth voted. But various recent studies show that among people younger than 25 who’ve completed some post-secondary education and who are no longer students, the turnout is 41.1 per cent. This compares to 32 per cent among those with no education. For those in the under 25 category who are still students the turnout is 43 per cent.  That’s not a small difference when you’re talking about vote percentages. So that’s an important reminder.

During my eight years living in Canada, I have found it curious that there is often more obsession on the part of Canadians with American elections and some aspects of politics than there is with Canadian elections.  I’ve watched that with some fascination because a lot of my work has to do with political and social movements, often in the US and increasingly in North America and globally.  In Obama’s victory, of course, the use of social media turned out the largest youth vote ever in US history. This was a historical landmark in terms of youth voter turnout.  The role of social media is extremely important for young people expressing their opinions today.

Since you contacted me, I’ve been analyzing the increasing youth engagement as we head into the federal election here in Canada.  Actually, I knew that in the US, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have been using political satire to get young people interested in elections.

And the same was now sparked in Canada by Rick Mercer.  On his season’s final episode he put out a challenge to young people to get involved in the election and as a consequence we’re seeing radical and unprecedented occurrences in Canada with student-organized “vote mobs”.  Interestingly, however, a number of the placards one sees in the youth videos explicitly state, “Rick, this isn’t for you, but yes we will vote!” There are now about 15 universities with “vote” videos on YouTube.  There was an interview recently with a young woman from Carleton University who is with VoteMob.ca and the top video on YouTube on this subject is a mashup of George Stroumboulopoulos and Rick Mercer and the Carleton U vote mob.

What I liked about this most recent video with Stroumboulopoulos and Mercer is that the signs that students are holding up clearly span across issues.  You hear people criticize young adults and say they are only interested in topics such as the cost of tuition.  But when you start looking at the young people who are doing these vote mobs, they are concerned about a diverse and fairly informed range of issues.  (see for example http://www.youtube … blend=3&ob=5

It’s interesting as well to look at the trends in tweets on this topic.  Google now has an option called Real Time and you can put anything in the search engine and see how many people are tweeting about a particular issue.  Right now, on April 19, there’s this huge spike in discussion around vote mobs.  If we continue to watch this up until May 2, this is going to increase.  It’ll be fascinating to watch.  And, of course, the real story will lie in what the turnout is.  On the other hand, some people are saying the vote mobs are preaching to the converted and that the youth in these groups are already voters.

Still, there seems to be a prevailing thought among older adults that youth are disengaged from social and political issues these days.  Do you think this is true?

The purpose of my newly-funded SSHRC project Social Media in the Hands of Young Citizens is to look at how young people are engaging in civic engagement or participatory democracy.  My previous SSHRC research, Rethinking Democracy, Media and Citizenship (found at http://www.meganboler.net) examined how people use digital media to engage in dissent from mainstream media, and this research evidenced emergent youth engagement.  One of our key findings was that many of the people who produce user-generated content about the major news stories don’t necessarily call themselves ‘political’.  They don’t use the term ‘activist’ and they simply don’t think of what they’re doing as political.

A key focus of my new research then is how young people are re-defining the very notion of ‘political’ as traditionally understood and defined.  What I see is that the term ‘social’ is more often used instead of the term ‘political’.  Even today, listening to the CTV interview, the young woman Yvonne Su said, “We’re interested in making voting social.” There’s a re-definition happening in what counts as political.  I think the best way to understand that is to examine the practices in which young people engage  (and awesome that Yvonne calls her group the Yes Women, playing on the renowned tactical media activists the Yes Men!) http://www.youtube … ture=related

When I was preparing for my current SSHRC research I looked at what primary social issues concern young people globally.  A vote mob is a spin on a flash mob, and flash mobs have been around for a while.   They’re usually organized via texting and mobile devices, and this mode of organizing is commonly used in youth action organizing.  The two key issues that are emerging as being of the greatest concern to youth are consumerism and the environment.  They don’t often talk about ‘capitalism’ but about ‘consumerism’ as a prevailing concern.  It’s a kind of politics but I don’t think they would use that word.  Still, they see consumerism as a force that concerns them and that they feel is defining people’s lives.  So often when you see a movement like Apathy is Boring or this newer movement Zeitgeist, the main concerns are the effects of consumerism and how that’s tied to the environment.

Can you give us an example?

There’s an organization where, rather than having a boycott, they will find a local grocery store or a business that has policies they support, such as promoting fair trade, and rather than doing the boycott they do what they call a ‘buycott’, which means they encourage people to buy at that store and get that retailer $10,000 for that day.

So these kinds of organized events, which are flash mob events, are redefining what we call the political landscape, especially as it relates to young people.  And those kinds of actions don’t necessarily fall into the spectrum or rubric of what we normally think about when we talk about politics or, certainly, electoral politics.

But what about this apathy in voting we keep hearing about?

Some people are saying that if there is youth apathy about elections it’s because politicians in Canada are not taking the time to direct their platforms and their politicking to young people.  What I’m noting is that young people might say, “Yeah, you’re not speaking to us and therefore you don’t engage us” but even more so, it’s a sense of disempowerment, that even if politicians were to address so-called youth concerns, there is a sense among young people of “What’s the point of our voting for you, given your doublespeak and broken promises?”

But of course it’s not only youth who feel this way. Disillusionment with elected representatives is widely shared across demographics and around the globe.  This crisis of public faith in politicians and media is what has fueled my last 10 years of research into digital dissent.  And today - thanks to digital communications -we hear more diverse views and voices because of social media, we are able to hear a lot of divergent voices expressing why people are frustrated.

For example, this new Zeitgeist movement has on its website a section of “critical thinking” videos; one warns us, “Don’t believe ANYTHING said by ANYONE,” and calls for shifting the paradigm from ‘belief’ to ‘understanding’.   The point they are making is that they believe there is very little one can believe given corporate and political investments, thus the call for a shift to ‘understanding’ rather than ‘believing,’ with the hope that through ‘understanding’ there is a way to make sense of what’s ‘real.’  Those are some of the connections I’m making between this current debate about youth apathy in Canada and larger global issues of youth engagement in democracy.

So perhaps political engagement is not simply about voting?

Absolutely.  I think that’s key and young people are explicitly stating this view: “Yes, we’re willing to vote, we’ll cast our vote, we’ll do this symbolic act, but we don’t have much faith even if you were talking about issues that affect youth.”  And I think this kind of skepticism towards ‘politics’ in its traditional sense is very widely shared, and one cannot claim it is only young people who feel that.

Provided by University of Toronto