Abstract
Since the 2008 global financial crisis, Britain’s young people have been disproportionately affected by policies of welfare retrenchment. Youth disillusionment with austerity has been cited as a reason for the youthquake witnessed in the 2017 General Election, where the Labour Party’s better-than-expected performance resulted in the loss of the ruling Conservative Party government’s parliamentary majority. The degree of one-party dominance among younger voters was unprecedented, with Labour’s aggressively pro-youth agenda paying dividends. However, this paper takes the attention away from voting behaviour and towards non-electoral forms of youth political participation in the UK. What are the strongest predictors of non-electoral political participation among young British people? Three possible predictors are explored: educational attainment, level of trust in politicians, and party identification. Three forms of non-electoral participation are considered: signing a petition, taking part in a boycott and sharing political messages on social media. Using a bespoke representative survey commissioned by Hope Not Hate, this paper finds that educational attainment does not have a particularly strong effect on non-electoral participation, with Labour Party identification being significantly associated with all three forms. A strong relationship is also discovered between identifying with a ‘minor party’ and non-electoral political participation among Britain’s young people.
Highlights
While the argument for there being a youthquake at the last General Election has been convincingly made [1,2,3,4], there are those who have disputed such findings on the basis of turnout, describing it as a mere “myth” or at best “tremor” [5]
With there being an association between austerity policies and youth protest in recent times, it would be expected that younger people who identify with “anti-austerity” parties such as Labour would be more likely to participate in non-electoral politics as a means to express their opposition to austerity policies
This paper examines non-electoral political participation among young British people in the context of austerity, finding that party identification is strongly associated with non-electoral politics in comparison to other possible predictors, such as educational attainment and political distrust
Summary
While the argument for there being a youthquake at the last General Election has been convincingly made [1,2,3,4], there are those who have disputed such findings on the basis of turnout, describing it as a mere “myth” or at best “tremor” [5]. Societies 2018, 8, 101 party memberships [16] in recent times, with young people becoming alienated from mainstream conventional politics in industrial European democracies [17,18]. Young citizens transiting into adulthood are more sensitive to, and influenced by, socioeconomic change in comparison to older cohorts in society [24,25] This is most relevant in the British context, as a number of studies have found that Britain’s young people have disproportionately borne the brunt of government austerity and policies of welfare retrenchment [26,27,28]. Three possible predictors are explored: educational attainment, trust in politicians and party identification
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