The Young Voter in British Politics

Abstract

IN A STABLE SOCIETY one would expect political socialization to be an education in traditionalism. In a society where the political temperature is low one would expect to find the young being effectively de-politicized, learning to accept and endorse the status quo, to assimilate the orientations to politics of their elders, and in particular to share with them certain consequential perceptions of what are and are not the salient issues of politics. So it is in Britain. The majority leave school at 15 ignorant of the workings of the political system and content to be so. The minority who stay on are carefully inducted into received constitutional orthodoxies and a view of their social environment that wholly inhibits critical thinking-a naive pragmatism that assumes that British institutions 'work' and because they work are as satisfactory as they could reasonably be. Of the 61 million people between 15 and 24 in England and Wales 85 per cent are in full-time jobs at the age of 17, 56 per cent at 15; 26 per cent are married; 90 per cent find politics a bore. They have no generalized empathy for public affairs. They are aware of certain issues but not powerfully involved in them. 'Politics? Well I've read all the posters that come to the house and you get these voting games and that's about all.' Sixty per cent believe it will make little or no difference to their lives which party is in power. (Rose, 1964; P. Abrams, 1963; Almond and Verba, 1963; M. Abrams, 1962; Odhams, 1961.) What is striking about British youth in the past decade is the growth of a 'youth culture' that has imposed a socially marginal and distinctively non-adult identity on the young in return for new economic and recreational opportunities. Hitherto this sort of artificial insulation of the young from adult roles was confined to schools and universities. If attitudes of acceptance and indifference now distinguish the politics of British youth these are perhaps the price of the more general extension