Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation

Combating Civic Deficit?

Mark Chou, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Catherine Hartung, Lesley J. Pruitt

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783489930
• eBook ISBN: 9781783489947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Prominent studies and opinion polls often claim that young people are disengaged from political institutions, distrustful of politicians, and disillusioned about democracy. Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation challenges these political stereotypes by asking whether young people have been contributing to or rectifying our civic deficit. In particular, it examines the role of civics education in addressing the so-called crisis of democracy. Turning away from conventional suggestions often advocated by politicians and educators that offer civics education as the solution, the book advances an alternate approach to civics – one that acknowledges the increasingly diverse ways in which young people are both engaging and disengaging politically.

Chapter One

Disengaged

Young People and Political Disengagement in Anglo-American Democracies

Mark Chou

Chances are, before she delivered her maiden speech in the British House of Commons on 14 July 2015, most Britons would have simply mistaken Mhairi Black for just another average twenty-year-old from Scotland. The newly elected Member of Parliament, who became Britain’s youngest MP since thirteen-year-old Christopher Monck in 1667, barely looked the part. She was young and lacking in the polish of most career politicians. But that, it turned out, only made her comments all the more stirring. Using her speech to regale the chamber with stories from her constituency of Paisley and Renfrewshire South, on the southwest fringes of Glasgow, Black reminded her colleagues that the place she called home was shared with both legendary figures like William Wallace and a ‘wonderful population with a cracking sense of humour’.

But these charms, as the Scottish National Party MP went on to say, do not hide the fact that ‘it’s not all fantastic’. For some time now, Black declared, life has been a struggle for many in Paisley and Renfrewshire South. ‘We’ve watched our town centres deteriorate. We’ve watched our communities decline’, she said to her fellow MPs in the chamber. ‘Our unemployment level is higher than that of the UK average. One in five children in my constituency go to bed hungry every night. Paisley Job Centre has the third highest number of sanctions in the whole of Scotland’.¹ Her point was illustrated by a particularly poignant story of a man whom Black described as having been ‘battered by life in every way imaginable’. With only enough money for a bus fare to the Job Centre or the local charity that fed him, she told the captive chamber that this man chose to go without food and drink for five days just to save enough money to travel to work. ‘When he was on the bus on the way to the Job Centre he fainted due to exhaustion and dehydration’, Black said. ‘He was 15 minutes late for the Job Centre and he was sanctioned for 13 weeks’.

Is it right that something like this can happen in modern-day Britain? Is it right, Black asked, that the Chancellor has so easily abolished housing benefits for everyone below the age of twenty-one? What does it say about a government, a country, when the only young person who can access housing benefits in the United Kingdom is a twenty-year-old MP? As Black put it: ‘[w]‌e are now in the ridiculous situation whereby because I am an MP not only am I the youngest, but I am also the only twenty-year-old in the whole of the United Kingdom that the Chancellor is prepared to help with housing’.

Within a matter of days, tens of millions of viewers from around the world had logged online to watch the ‘Baby of the House’ deliver her maiden speech to Parliament. Trending as far away as Nigeria, the speech was even picked up in a spoof by well-known political satirist Amy Poehler while appearing on United Kingdom’s comedy talk show, The Last Leg.

There are a number of possible reasons that explain why Black’s speech went viral. For one, her gender has been a hot topic of discussion for some. For others, the fact that she’s a Scot is important, particularly given the meteoric rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in 2015. As important as these reasons are, what had most people talking was Black’s age or, more to the point, her youth. Only nineteen when she joined the SNP, Black now holds the title of the youngest British Member of Parliament for over three hundred years. She may not think of herself as a role model for young people in Britain, but many have come to see her as a representative for a generation of young Britons who are now facing some of the harshest social and economic conditions seen in decades. In the words of Benjamin Bowman, a British youth researcher, ‘Black represents Britain’s young people as they are. She comes from a working class family, she is a football fan and she has had her Twitter account pulled apart for swearwords and slang. She is articulate, intelligent and able’.² Her speech struck such a chord because it so perfectly described a reality that many young people in Britain have come to know all too well.

But there is another equally important reason behind Black’s instant celebrity that is closely connected with her youth. Black is not only young; she is also political. Known to many as the ‘SNP firebrand’, Black’s interest in politics was something instilled in her by her parents from a very young age.³ For many political commentators, this sets her apart from her contemporaries. She is actively involved in community and party politics at a time when all we seem to hear is how young people in Britain and other Anglo-American democracies are disengaging from politics in droves. Rightly or wrongly, Black’s celebrity is in part because she is the odd one out. To many, she is the symbol of everything today’s youth are not: political, engaged and active.

A look at some recent trends confirms as much. There is now mounting evidence to suggest that unlike Mhairi Black, many young people in Anglo-American democracies are not only disconnected from politics, they are also disinterested in it. The most worrying aspect of this disinterest has manifested itself in electoral participation. Looking at the recent voting patterns in Britain, the United States and Australia, for example, we see that more young people in the past decade or so have been abandoning the polls than in previous decades. Today, the young aren’t voting nor are they participating in other arenas of formal electoral politics. On top of this, they’re also turning their backs on mainstream political parties and movements. The result is that an increasing number of young people neither knows nor cares who their elected representatives are. All this shows that young people have abandoned the two main avenues of political participation as it has been traditionally defined in most democracies.⁴ First, they seem to be no longer interested in conventional forms of participation, which ranges from voting to interest in party politics to engagement with interest groups. And second, fewer young people care to influence politics by petitioning their elected representatives and thereby taking part in the formal arenas of politics as defined by parties, parliaments and congress.

All this is capped off by several findings which suggest that some young people would even swap their democratic system for a non-democratic form of government if they could. A far cry from a Mhairi Black, who is both young and politically engaged, it seems today’s youth are, to borrow the words of Pericles, the ancient Athenian democrat, ‘useless’ citizens who refuse to participate in public affairs.⁵ It is of little wonder that politicians, policymakers, researchers and even popular culture have all portrayed the young as politically apathetic and lacking the necessary political knowledge⁶ to uphold their democratic responsibilities effectively.⁷

Of course, it would be wrong to lay the blame solely at the feet of today’s young. Voter turnout across all age groups has been declining in a number of Anglo-American democracies for some time.⁸ As Simon Tormey has put it, ‘The golden age of voter turnout was half a century ago, and since then we have seen a fairly steady decline in advanced democracies’.⁹ But it is not just voting numbers that are on the decline. The other key measures political analysts typically look to gauge the health of a democracy—party membership, trust in politicians and the general interest a society has in politics—are also on a downward trend. It is a ‘worldwide phenomena’, argue Richard Niemi and Jonathan Klingler: ‘declining trust and confidence in political institutions, lower respect for authority and its responsiveness to citizen concerns, and reduced political involvement’ are trends visible not only in Britain, but in the United States, Australia, Canada and a raft of other so-called mature democracies as well.¹⁰

Whereas citizens in the Middle East and North Africa have been recently fighting for more democracy, their counterparts in North America, Western Europe and Australasia seem to have given up on politics. To the vast majority of citizens within these democratic countries, politics and politicians are dirty words, synonymous with other undesirable social goods, including corruption, greed and dishonesty. Today, as English political scholar Matthew Flinders writes, citizens ‘have become distrustful of politicians, sceptical about democratic institutions, and disillusioned about the capacity of democratic politics to resolve pressing social concerns’.¹¹ It is a sad truth but democracies today are not sustained by the kind of healthy scepticism which, for Flinders, they need to thrive. Increasingly, what drives citizens in advanced Anglo-American democracies is a brand of corrosive cynicism that is conducive to political suspicion, contempt and disengagement. Citizens are giving up or at least giving into the sense that politics is hopeless.

It is against this backdrop that talk has turned in recent years to a so-called crisis of democracy.¹² While certainly alarmist in nature, it is also true that all is not well in the house of democracy. If the existence of electoral democracy hinges on an engaged citizenry and a representative political class that together work to keep government accountable and functional, then everything we have talked about would suggest that there is a critical failure. Disengaged citizens, unrepresentative politicians, bureaucratic morass—these are just some of the characteristics of democracy which commentators and everyday people use to describe politics in countries from the United Kingdom to the United States. There is a palpable sense of a ‘crisis of actually existing representative democracy, a democracy that rotates around politicians, elections, and parliaments’, in Tormey’s words.¹³

Fairly or not, young people are commonly singled out as the main culprits of this contemporary crisis of democracy.¹⁴ As is often pointed out, young people’s political disengagement today will have grave consequences tomorrow. After all, today’s young will become tomorrow’s citizens. What will become of democracy when the future rests with a generation who have become increasingly politically apathetic and disengaged? Is democracy not headed for troubled waters when not insignificant numbers of ‘millennials’ are so blasé about democracy that they would be willing to do away with it for something better? ‘From this perspective’, writes Rys Farthing, it is easy to think that ‘a serious democratic deficit is imminent—the future of Western democracy is under threat’.¹⁵

But to what extent are these assessments really accurate or complete? Are young people turning away from democracy, or are these claims showing only one part of the picture? What factors help explain their disengagement? And what is to be done? We will answer these questions in this chapter by taking a more in-depth look at the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One Disengaged: Young People and Political Disengagement in Anglo-American Democracies
• Chapter Two Democracy in Crisis: Are Young People to Blame?
• Chapter Three Civics and Citizenship Education: Defender or Divider of Democracy?
• Chapter Four Different Ways, Different Domains: The Everyday Politics of Young People
• Chapter Five Brexit, Bono and the Entrepreneurial Self: Young People’s Participation as ‘Global Citizens’
• Chapter Six Co-designed: A New Approach to Civics and Citizenship
• Index
• About the Authors: