Youth,politics,and participation in a changing world

A social generational understanding of youth

Woodman and Wyn (2015) make a significant contribution in delivering a sophisticated case for rethinking dominant notions of individualization and engaging with the concept of social generation. They explain how this differs from the more simplified ‘generationalism,’ which inaccurately makes assumptions of homogeneity for young people of a certain age range born in certain years. In contrast, social generation is not about age as such but about shared social, political and economic contexts and understandings that differ from the previous generation.

In the case of the current generation of young people, Woodman and Wyn highlight that the distinctness of this social generation is evident particularly around the spread of globalization, neoliberal economic policies, enhanced expectations of education that comes at a rising cost, and increasingly precarious working conditions, which often include time demands that pose new challenges for maintaining friendships and community. These changes, they say, ‘have been driven by the implementation, sometimes under duress, of “market” reforms, opening domestic markets to international trade, liberalizing labour laws and pushing to increase individual investment in secondary education’ (2015: 1). Moreover, they say, these reforms have shaped young people’s experiences most. At the same time, digital developments mean young people are more likely to be aware of related events globally, so they are often aware that they are most affected.

By documenting how conditions of young people’s lives have changed significantly around the world, differing from their parents, yet still creating and recreating long-present inequalities, Woodman and Wyn show both commonalities and differences in young people’s experiences and needs. While noting that young people’s experiences can and do differ across a variety of axes including, but not limited to, gender, race, and class, they also articulate how, by taking a social generation approach, it is possible to see how young people around the world often face different but highly related outcomes and possibilities as a generation. They argue that:

[t]he concept of social generation has assisted us to trace the way the possibilities available to young people in general are remade over time, and with their responses to these possibilities, [they] create and recreate patterns of inequality. Old divisions have to be actively reinforced, or even made anew. (Woodman and Wyn, 2015: 169)

Overall, as Woodman and Wyn highlight, when considering young people, politics, and participation it is imperative to contextualize our research in terms of both continuity and change. They demonstrate how a social generation lens can help develop understandings that can effectively account for both. Collin’s book offers an in-depth study dealing with some of that change, particularly around digital actions and their relationships to offline political actions and understandings. In doing so, Collin (2015: 10, 156) applies Woodman and Wyn’s social generation approach, including not only age, but also broader social conditions that relate to wider changes in how citizens understand politics and participate informally in democracies.

Not digital democracy but democracy in a digital age?

While the title suggests a focus on online participation, Collin approaches her study of young people and participation more broadly, noting that, rather than ‘treating the online and off-line as independent realms of experience’, her book instead considers, ‘“mediated youth participation” as a contemporary expression of youth citizenship’ (2015: 12). Highlighting that digital media practices exemplify the permeability of national borders, Collin situates the digital within a broader range of issues and actions under current conditions of globalization. While noting that digital media can often reinforce existing structures, Collin also highlights associations with the new digital forms of politics and participation, and notes that policies addressing youth participation still tend to focus on traditional practices.

Collin argues that rather than being disconnected from politics, youth are turning to new modes of participation and focusing on different policy targets. Like Harris (2008), in her research on young women, participation, and online cultures, Collin argues that the internet offers youth distinctive means to express themselves and create public space. This is a growing area of significant research when it comes to young people and politics. Research from 2012 reports that 80% of young people in the USA, 94% in the UK, and 90% in Australia were using social media; as Vromen et al. (2015: 83) note, this widespread usage means that young people no longer need to join formal political organizations to participate in or be educated about collective political action. Likewise, Collin reports that the way young people are interested in engaging online does not typically align with government youth participation policies: ‘The more sites are “managed” and controlled the less inclined young people are to engage with them … young people want to be taken seriously as producers and partners in processes of online engagement and deliberation’ (Collin, 2015: 40). Moreover, Collin proposes that where youth participation policies delegitimize some types of participation while legitimizing others, they serve to reinforce existing issues of elitism and thus increasingly alienate youth from traditional politics (2015: 158).

With participatory approaches growing in community, non-government, and even corporate sectors, youth have tended to turn away from government-led initiatives toward other public spaces and actors. In doing so, Collin asserts, young people constantly seek to avoid cooptation and instead gravitate toward organizations and activities in which they can practice greater agency. Through her work with such organizations, Collin highlights how youth in the UK and Australia identify and take action on issues that matter to them, and work to shape their society through everyday means. In doing so, she notably worked directly with young people to gauge their views on participation and experiences of participating. This is significant. Furthermore, she suggests that youth participation policies need to be underpinned by multiplicity and pluralism, including means of having fun and individualized action aimed at improving both social conditions and the individual.

Overall Collin’s study makes unique, important contributions in looking at organizations that foster both vertical links to political elites and horizontal communication between staff and young participants. She points to the need for thinking about not only how policies can promote youth engagement, but also how institutions might adapt in light of wider social change. Moreover, she suggests that politics and political institutions must change, while young people must also keep working for change and advocating for their involvement. Only through such changes, Collin convincingly suggests, can the democratic disconnect be significantly addressed. I now turn to Lawless and Fox’s study of young people’s understandings of more formal, traditional political participation, as their research helps broaden understandings of ways young people approach (or avoid) politics.

Formal politics affects youth but does not appeal to them

In Running from Office, Lawless and Fox report on their study in the US, including a survey of over 4000 high school and college students and interviews with over 100 of the same young people. They weave a compelling narrative using clear, well-explained charts and graphs contextualized with young people’s own personal reflections. Their overall thesis is that the vast majority of American young people today have no interest whatsoever in running for elected office. They note that this finding holds across a number of demographic factors, including race, sex, region, party affiliation, religion, education, and income, though there are differences within and between these groups. While Americans overall have recently shown declining trust in public officials, the authors highlight that young people are less politically engaged and interested relative to their older counterparts, and they are less positive about the US’s global standing and the government in general. This is consistent with Bennett et al.’s (2009: 106) earlier assertion that young people today are less likely to feel a duty to take part in formal political activities such as voting.

Young people are not lazy, apathetic, or disconnected from social change. Rather, many youth aspire to leadership and making positive changes in their communities and the world. Lawless and Fox suggest that ensuring the health of democracy requires each generation to note and respond to a call to public service. Their research showed that young people have a keen interest in a number of salient issues. Yet, at the same time, ‘[t]hey view the political system as ineffective, broken, and unappealing’ (Lawless and Fox, 2015: xi). In short, while young people often want to improve social conditions, they typically do not see politics as an effective way to do that. While recognizing the importance of other ways young people contribute to social change, Lawless and Fox maintain that running for office is also critical. In this way they do not aim to denigrate young people’s everyday politics but rather to demonstrate that it is also critical for young people to take an interest in electoral politics, which inevitably shape their worlds now and in the future.

Like Collin, Lawless and Fox place much of the blame for young people’s disengagement, lack of interest, and at times even disgust with formal politics, at the feet of existing government officials and elected representatives, arguing that:

Washington’s dreadful performance over the past two decades has taken a toll on the young Americans who have come to know politics through this spectacle. They see politics as pointless and unpleasant. They see political leaders as corrupt and selfish. (Lawless and Fox 2015: 4)

They link this decline in trust or regard for public officials to increasing political polarization over the last several decades. Similarly, in light of polls suggesting that young Australians are becoming less supportive of democracy, Oliver (2013) hypothesized this apparent rejection of the current political system could be due to disillusionment with politicians’ behavior. While as Chou (2013) notes, few concrete conclusions can be drawn from such polls that do not directly engage with young people to further contextualize their answers, Lawless and Fox’s work with youth in the US appears to confirm the idea that politicians’ behavior can impact young people’s views of politics.

Questions around digital media engagement may be another part of the reason young people are averse to running for office – in today’s public world of youth heavily involved in social media, there may be more to lose when having one’s life examined under a microscope compared to previous generations. ‘Concerns about lack of privacy and skeletons in the closet emerged’ many times, with one young man saying that if he ran for office ‘his parents would probably be leery about “how everyone would look into everything [they’ve] ever done”’ (Lawless and Fox, 2015: 59). This confirms Ekstrom’s (2015: 1) suggestion that most young people experience Facebook as a risky environment for engaging with controversial issues and experience fear of ‘face-threatening responses’. This is especially concerning for some particular groups of youth, since social media tends to reinforce existing social inequalities; for example, girls often worry about risks in the online environment where they experience specific vulnerabilities. Considering such differences in research on young people’s politics is crucial since recent changes in young people’s lives suggest ‘that social inequalities in civic engagement may be growing over time for young people’ (Wray-Lake and Hart, 2012: 456).

Despite many challenges, Lawless and Fox maintain hope that youth can be engaged to run for electoral office; they make a number of suggestions they believe might facilitate that. Their ideas, which include ‘PlayStation for politics’ and a ‘GoRun’ app to help young people identify races they might contest, are interesting, but they do not draw on broader relevant research to showcase how or why these approaches might work. While young people may use technology and social media more than older Americans, ‘if you build it they will come’ should not be an uncritically applied maxim with regard to engaging youth online, particularly given Collin’s point that the online and offline spheres are not separate. Future research could investigate whether such efforts could be useful or instead might be ignored or forgotten in a short period, like many technical quick-fixes proposed from above to engage youth. Noting lessons from the other two books, an alternate, perhaps more effective approach would likely include actually asking young people how to better engage them, drafting suggestions from those discussions, and/or engaging young people to co-design initiatives.

Conclusion

Like Harris et al.’s earlier (2010) work, the books reviewed here suggest that while young people continue to create informal, individualized strategies to deal with issues they care about, many still want formal political leaders to listen to and address their concerns. Given that youth participation continues to change and move away from formal politics, yet formal electoral politics remains essential to democracy, ongoing research is needed to fully and accurately capture young people’s political contributions. Critical engagement must be applied to see youth participation for what it is, where it is, while still keeping in mind and advocating for the importance of young people’s participation in traditional politics. Indeed, I argue that, ‘Scholars, policymakers, and those working with youth can learn from these everyday lived experiences of young people and use that knowledge to respond better, working with youth realities rather than against them’ (Pruitt, 2017: 88).

The books reviewed here offer timely contributions on how youth and youth participation are understood, conceptually and practically. Focusing on the US, the UK, and Australia, these works add to and inform existing debates about young people’s roles in English-speaking countries typically classed as ‘advanced democracies’. The authors apply a critical lens to the roles available to young people, and highlight the many ways their life choices are limited by policy and discourse that does not adequately account for youth. In doing so, their work emphasizes the ongoing need to reflect on the state of democracy and young people’s actual and perceived roles as citizens, not only in the three countries focused on here, but around the globe.