Is Voting for Young People?

Martin P. Wattenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000048858
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Campagnes politiques et élections

In 2016, Hillary Clinton managed to win the Democratic nomination despite losing young voters to Bernie Sanders by a margin of 73 to 26 percent. The fact that senior citizens were four times more likely to vote in the primaries than young people enabled her to survive her lack of youth appeal. But in the general election, Clinton's problems with young people turned into her Achilles heel. Young people failed to come out to vote as much as she needed, or to support her in sufficient numbers when they did vote. What will happen in 2020, another history-making election? Already in late 2019, journalists were referring to the generation gap as "the most important divide among Democratic voters."

Is Voting for Young People? explores the reasons why young people are less likely to follow politics and vote in the United States (as well as in many other established democracies), no matter who the candidates are, or what the issues may be. This brief, accessible, and provocative book suggests ways of changing that.

New to the Fifth Edition

• For the first time since its original 2006 publication, the entire text has been updated with the most recent available data and analysis.

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• A new chapter has been added— Young People and Politics in the Trump Era.

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• New chapter-opening vignettes illustrate one of the key points in each chapter.

CHAPTER 1
The Aging of Regular Newspaper Readers

In 2016, the General Social Survey found that just 3 percent of people under the age of 25 reported reading a newspaper every day, whereas 54 percent never read a newspaper. Among senior citizens, 40 percent said they read a newspaper daily and just 20 percent said they never read a newspaper.

Go any place where a variety of people are waiting around in the morning, such as an airport terminal or a train station, and you are likely to observe a now-common behavior pattern: the younger someone is, the less likely he or she is reading a newspaper. It was not always this way. Old movie scenes portray everyone reading newspapers. Young and old alike are shown reading newspapers, as that was how most people got their news. Ever since the 1960s, however, when television supplanted newspapers as the major source of news information, the newspaper business has been fading.

The decline of newspaper consumption has been largely due to generational replacement, with each new cohort of young people being less likely than its elders to read newspapers. Reading a newspaper every day is a habit that, once acquired, is generally continued throughout one’s lifetime, and for most people such a routine either is or is not developed by the time a person reaches voting age. What has happened in recent years is that relatively few young adults have picked up this habit.

As with all the major trends outlined in this book, this is not just an American phenomenon. Throughout the established democracies, survey data over time show that regular newspaper readers are now considerably older than was the case in the 1970s. In country after country, the last four decades have seen a transformation of the newspaper from a medium for everyone to an information source primarily for older people.

This worldwide trend would be of little consequence were newspapers being replaced by another source of political information that people could learn as much from. But to date, no viable replacement for newspapers has emerged. One can, of course, learn the basic outline of current events from sources such as CNN or Fox News. But these channels cover only what a newspaper reader would get by simply scanning the headlines. If one really wants to be informed about political matters, decades of academic research support the conclusion that newspapers are the best media source.²

Over two centuries ago, James Madison foresaw not only the promise of American democracy but also how the then-young medium of newspapers could play a key role in enabling ordinary citizens to participate effectively in democratic governance. As Colleen Sheehan writes, “Madison envisioned newspapers serving as vehicles for circulation of the ideas of the literati to the people of the extensive American republic, resulting in the refinement and enlargement of the public views and the emergence of an enlightened public opinion.”³ Madison would probably be very pleased with the depth of content available in today’s newspapers but disappointed that so many citizens are passing up the opportunity to avail themselves of this wealth of information.

Almost exactly 200 years after Madison assumed the presidency of the United States, his successor looked upon newspapers with indifference. In a fall 2003 interview with Brit Hume of Fox News, President George W. Bush clearly stated that he didn’t read newspapers.⁴ This statement led many pundits and scholars to gasp in amazement that a president could ignore such a valuable source of news about the world. Longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas argued that Bush could hardly claim to be in touch with public opinion if he wasn’t reading a newspaper. She wrote that “Anyone who wants to stay in touch with national, international and local events looks forward to reading the newspaper every day. The variety and breadth of newspaper stories make Americans the best-informed people in the world.”⁵ It should be noted that President Bush maintained that he did not need to read newspapers because his chief of staff and national security advisor provided him with daily news briefings. But this satisfied few critics, who wondered whether even the most trusted aides could be expected to relay a comprehensive sense of the news of the day to the commander in chief.

Left unsaid in this hullabaloo was the hard truth that the percentage of the American public who reads a daily newspaper has been declining for quite some time, and has continued in the decade since George W. Bush left office. Whether Bush’s avoidance of newspapers was a good practice for a president or not, the fact that such a large proportion of the population no longer bothers to read a newspaper has made it easier for a president to say he doesn’t either. A few decades ago, it probably would have seemed outlandish for the leader of the free world to say that he doesn’t read a newspaper; today, it is not. This chapter tells the story of how generational change has contributed to this transformation in the United States, as well as in most advanced industrialized democracies.

WHO READS A NEWSPAPER EVERY DAY ANYMORE?

This chapter’s data presentation is premised on the theoretical perspective that newspaper reading is a well-ingrained habit. Data from the 1992–1996 American National Election Panel Study offer strong confirmation for this premise. In both years, the same randomly selected individuals were asked how many days they had read a newspaper in the past week. Sixty-seven percent of respondents who in 1992 had said they read a paper every day said the same thing four years later. In contrast, only 13 percent of the respondents who had said they had not read a paper every day during the past week in 1992 indicated they did so when they were reinterviewed in 1996. The correlation between the actual number of days a respondent said he or she read a newspaper in the past week in 1992 and in 1996 was quite impressive at .64. The stability coefficient for party identification, which is widely regarded as the most stable of all political attitudes, is typically about .80 over four years. Given the disruptions of people’s routines that can easily occur in any given week, the fact that responses to the newspaper reading question are nearly as stable as party identification is solid evidence of a deep-rooted habit.

The most straightforward way to present data on newspaper reading routines is to report the percentage who say they read a paper every day of the week. Of course, most people who do not read a paper every day will occasionally pick one up and skim through it. In all likelihood, President Bush sometimes read a newspaper; when he said he didn’t, he probably meant that it wasn’t a habit for him. And it is the trends in this habit that we are interested in.

Figure 1.1 displays survey data from 1957 to 2018 regarding the percentage of the adult American public who reported reading a newspaper every day of the week. In the late 1950s, surveys indicated that roughly three-quarters of the adult population (then defined as over 21 years of age) read a paper every day. Not shown in the data in Figure 1.1 is the...