Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 2 | Youth Vote 2000 They'd Rather Volunteer, page 2 (low bandwidth)

“The candidates made a decision to reach out to parents more than to young people,” says Julian S. Scott, a 19-year-old in Philadelphia, who voted for the first time. “It was funny that the candidates spoke about the lower grades of school and not higher education—when they know that college students can vote. I guess they looked at the numbers and knew that students don’t vote as much as older people.”

Scott said he voted because he saw that some issues, like tax cuts and help with college tuition, would soon have an effect on him. Also, he followed the race closely because he’d taken an innovative American Government course at Roxborough High School in which he and classmates conducted surveys, analyzed candidates’ positions and wrote voters’ guides.

Outside of that course, Scott said, most of his friends saw nothing of interest in the campaign, ignored it and didn’t vote—echoing what young people around the country said in surveys and interviews. At some point in the campaign, then, the communication gap between candidates and young people became impassable: no matter what the candidates said, most young people had stopped listening.

They Say: We Don’t Know Enough to Vote
Apart from the communications gap, many young people said, simply, “I don’t know enough about the candidates to vote.” This was the statement selected by a majority of young people who were unsure whether they would vote last November, according to the Princeton survey.

No wonder. For one thing, campaign advertising bypassed the young even in the battleground states where candidates ran most of their ads. In a Third Millennium study of nine of those major media markets, 64 percent of campaign television advertising was found to be directed at people over 50, who represent 37 percent of the population. By comparison, only 14.2 percent of the campaigns’ advertising was directed at people between the ages 18 and 34, who make up 31 percent of the population.

“We attempted to demonstrate that there is a cycle of mutual neglect that exists between candidates and young adults,” says Richard Thau, president of Third Millennium. He adds that the 2000 campaign perpetuated a cyclical problem: politicians didn’t pay much attention to young adults because they don’t vote enough; and, to some extent, young adults don’t know enough to vote because political ad campaigns ignore them.

But political issues don’t make it to the kitchen table, either. It’s becoming the norm these days for young people to grow up in homes where parents don’t talk about politics or vote, according to the Secretaries of State study. Almost half of the survey participants said their parents rarely, if ever, spoke about politics; among this group of young people, three out of four didn’t vote in 1996. Only 42 percent of the young people said their mother or father votes in every election. “My parents don’t vote,” said one participant. “So I guess that’s probably why I don’t vote.”

In surveys, young people continually report that they don’t know much about the way democracy works or who the key players are, yet few schools require courses in American government. “At present, civic education is in considerable disarray,” Derek Bok, Harvard University’s former president, has written. His findings: Fewer than half of the states require high school students to spend even a single semester taking civics or government, courses that often cover a hodgepodge of topics and in which teaching tends to be didactic and dull. “Not surprisingly,” Bok wrote, “most investigators have found that civic education in its current form has little or no subsequent effect on voting or other forms of civic participation.”

A poor excuse? Older Americans may scoff at the thought of an information gap in this Internet age, but there is a time gap to consider as well. People between the stressful ages of 18 and 29 are starting college, jobs, and families and starting to worry about their own children’s health and education. In 1996, nearly three-in-ten young people who had registered to vote but didn’t get to the polls told the Census Bureau they couldn’t get time off from work or school, or were too busy. Older Americans can also relate to this problem: Among all registered voters who didn’t vote in 1996, 22 percent said they were too busy or couldn’t get time off from school or work, compared with 8 percent in 1980. “Perhaps it’s a sign of the times—the hectic schedules and increasing demands of employers,” the bureau concluded.

They Say: Politics Stinks!
I’d Rather Volunteer
Most Americans, including two-out-of-three young people, believe that television accurately portrays government employees as mindless bureaucrats and politicians as inept, corrupt buffoons. “On entertainment television, when government institutions do serve the public, it is usually because mavericks or whistle-blowers fight the system to make it work,” concluded a 1999 study of TV and public opinion that was sponsored by the Partnership for Trust in Government, a coalition of nonprofit organizations that promotes citizen participation.

Politicians, paradoxically, build these negative stereotypes into their campaign materials and strategies, says Geri Mannion, chair of the Strengthening U.S. Democracy program at Carnegie Corporation. “My pet peeve is that as we’re here trying to encourage citizens to participate in political life, elected officials are out there running campaigns against government and public service. Almost no one is saying public service is a decent profession.”

If young people are more cynical and iconoclastic than their elders, it may be because they had fewer icons to start with. Michael Schudson, a sociologist, says older Americans grew up with political heroes and rose-tinted pictures of government, but that today’s young adults grew up with political scandals and a government that bought $600 hammers. “Our youth culture has turned savvy and ironic, where it’s easier to joke about politics than say ‘I really want to participate in democracy,’ which now sounds simple-minded,” says Schudson, who is professor of communications at the University of California in San Diego. “We’ve created a very different world and we don’t know what the mindset is for a young person trying to navigate it. But what we’re seeing is that young people are turning away from politics toward activities that have a human face, and that speaks quite well for them.”

Next page: Students enrolled in American Government course at
Roxborough High School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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