Too Young to Participate? The Effect of the Transition to Adulthood on Political Participation

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have often assumed — implicitly or explicitly — that we are witnessing a transformation of citizens’ political participation due to new generational or cohort characteristics (Pirie and Worcester, 1998, 2000; Morris, 2003; Biais et al., 2004; Dalton, 2008b; Inglehart, 2008); that voting people participate relatively less — or differently — as a result of changes in the social and political context in which they grow up. Chapter 5 explored the political attitudes and behaviour of new cohorts, finding that some cohort characteristics can indeed be observed, but that these are very different to the ones proposed in other studies and are observable in only some countries. In addition, Chapter 5 provided findings indicating that young people also participate differently because of their life stage.