Young people’s political participation and protest is an exciting and compelling subject. It is a hot topic in political circles, in the media and in academia, in Britain and around the world, but discussions are often couched in stereotypes, labels, melodrama and inaccuracies. This book documents and analyses the political participation of young people using an interdisciplinary approach and providing historical contexts, in order to provide a more measured and comprehensive understanding of the subject.
In Britain, the already burgeoning interest in young people’s political participation grew with the so-called ‘youthquake’, that is to say the surge in political awareness, engagement, activism and electoral turnout of young people in the 2017 General Election. It came on the heels of high levels of political involvement of young people in the 2016 European Union membership referendum and the 2014 Scottish independence referendum (when 16- and 17-year-olds could vote), as well as an increase since 2015 in the number of supporters and members of political parties, including youth wings, student wings and networks such as Momentum (Pickard 2017a, b; Avril 2018). Britain has also been experiencing a growth and diversification of youth-led protest actions. In 2010, the country witnessed the biggest youth-led demonstrations in a generation with young people adopting traditional and innovative means of protest, primarily in reaction to neoliberal policies and austerity measures (Olcese and Saunders 2014; Pickard 2014a, b), which have deeply affected young people as pupils, students and workers in Britain and elsewhere around the world (Pickard and Bessant 2017, 2018), leading to other ongoing protests actions that are part of a youth-led global wave of protest , notably about social injustices and increasingly about environmental degradation, for example, on climate change with the #FridaysForFuture #ClimateStrike movement inspired by Swedish school pupil Greta Thunberg and direct action by Extinction Rebellion. At the same time, successive British governments have legislated to monitor, repress and criminalise protest actions (della Porta 1997; Grasso and Bessant 2018; Pickard 2018a, d, 2019) as part of a securitisation process. The political environment of the early twenty-first century has also been marked, to a lesser extent, by urban riots in 2011 (Bloom 2012; Mycock and Tonge 2012), as well as concerns about the religious and political radicalisation of young people (Coppock et al. 2018). This all comes within the context of the rapid growth in the use of digital technologies and especially social media in political communications among young people and aimed at young people (Theocharis 2012; Vromen 2017; Boulianne and Theocharis 2018).
Not only have young people been voting more and protesting more, they have also been at the vanguard of expanding the political repertoire with creative forms of collective citizenship that stretch our political imagination. From youth-led campaigns against the ‘tampon tax’, knife crime, plastic waste and climate change to environment-friendly lifestyle choices, online and offline young people are doing and living politics, as what I call DIO political participation (Do-It-Ourselves). Thus, Britain has been the crucible of fundamental events and evolutions regarding politics, protest and young people.
This book offers a holistic and up-to-date study of young people’s political participation at the start of the twenty-first century in Britain with historical background and references to other advanced democracies around the world. It is based on my long-term research project that links up academic and more popular discussions on political engagement and disengagement among young people. When referring to young people, I mostly mean 14- to 24-year-olds who have reached a point in their lives where they are usually paying attention to discussions about politics within their family, in peer settings, in education and in the work environment, but they have not necessarily ‘settled down’, in terms of relationships, employment and housing. Knowingly or unknowingly, these young people are being exposed to politics and are being politically socialised. They are citizens with values and opinions. I embrace an interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approach by referring to studies in Sociology, Political Science, Political Sociology and Youth Studies on young people’s political participation. I seek to go beyond the ambivalent media stereotypes of politically apathetic or politically manipulated young people. I argue that many young people in Britain are interested in political issues and are politically active. In this book, I explain why and how.
In Politics, Protest and Young People, I pay particular attention to dominant scholarly concepts and theories about young people, in relation to citizenship, political generations, electoral participation, non-electoral forms of political participation and protest. My analysis covers themes central to young people and political participation, including the role of citizenship studies and political literacy, the voting age and enfranchisement, barriers to electoral registration and voting, generational effects, relations between political parties and young people, and the ‘youthquake’. I also explore the use of digital technologies in political participation, issue-based political interest and fresh creative forms of political participation and dissent, including DIO politics. This is political participation instigated and navigated by young people themselves, involving lifestyle choices and/or campaigning, through informal collective actions. These usually operate outside formal political institutions and are often enabled by digital technologies that create a sense of belonging, which is important to young people’s sense of identity. I analyse the wide variety of ways young people are renewing politics and the political environment, as they expand the repertoire of possible political actions (Pickard and Bessant 2017; Theocharis and van Deth 2018) through opportunities created by the internet and social media, as well as a shift away from electoral participation (Norris 2002, 2005; Vromen 2017). Moreover, I challenge subjective binary labels about political participation that are often employed when describing the political participation of young people based on outdated and often subjective notions, such as ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ forms of action (for example, being a paid-up member of a political party versus going on a demonstration). With this book, I aim to provide a well-rounded study based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of young people and their political participation. The 2010 student-led protests, ongoing climate change protests, the referendums of 2014 and 2016, as well as the 2015 and 2017 General Elections are used as case studies to demonstrate how many young people are politically engaged, energised and inventive.
The research for this book is based on work I have been doing on young people and political participation in Britain for the past three decades. For the overwhelming majority of that time, the dominant discourse in the mainstream media and in some sections of academia regarding young people and politics was negative and pessimistic (for example, Parry et al. 1992; Mulgan and Wilkinson 1997; Pirie and Worcester 1998; Park 2000; Kimberlee 2002; Russell et al. 2002). Two contradictory stereotypes stood out and for both the ‘blame’ were placed squarely on the shoulders of young citizens themselves.
First, young people were portrayed primarily as politically disengaged and/or disinterested, summed up by terms such as the ‘apathetic generation’, implying that young people were immature and could not be bothered to get involved in politics and civism (for a ...