Uninterested Youth? Young People’s Attitudes towards Party Politics in Britain

Following the outcome of the 2001 and 2005 General Elections, when the numbers of abstainers outweighed the numbers of Labour voters on both occasions, much attention has focused upon the state of British democracy and how to enthuse the electorate, especially young people. While the government is exploring ways to make the whole process of voting easier, it may be failing to tackle the real problem—that youth appear to find the business of politics uninviting and irrelevant. This paper examines data derived from a nationwide survey of over 700 young people in order to shed light on what lies at the heart of young people’s apparent disengagement from formal politics in Britain—political apathy or a sense of political alienation. The findings reveal that they support the democratic process, but are sceptical of the way the British political system is organised and led, and are turned off by politicians and the political parties. However, there is no uniform youth orientation to politics, and the data indicate that views differ according to social class, educational history, and also gender. However both ethnicity and region of the country in which young people live seem to have little influence in structuring political attitudes and behaviour. The landslide re-election of the Labour party to national government at the 2001 British General Election was over-shadowed by the lowest voter turnout rate since 1918, and has led some to claim that Britain is experiencing a “crisis of democratic politics” (Harrop, 2001, pp.295-313). Yet, the aggregate figure of 59.4 per cent (down from 71.6 per cent at the previous General Election in 1997) itself masked important differences in rates of electoral participation within the electorate. Voter turnout was lowest in constituencies of relatively high socio-economic deprivation, such as Liverpool Riverside (34 per cent) and Glasgow Shettleston (39 per cent), and amongst marginalized groups such as ethnic minorities (47 per cent) (MORI, 2001, p.3). With only 39 per cent of eligible 18 to 24 year olds voting in 2001 (a reduction of 27 per cent since 1997), political “disconnection” is broadly considered to be particularly acute amongst young people (Norris, 2001; Henn et al., 2002), a trend that has been identified across all European states (European Communities, 2003). As a response and in an attempt to re-engage the electorate, the Government revised the electoral procedures to simplify and extend postal voting at the 2005 general election. Yet even with the massive increase in postal voting (estimated to have increased from 1.4 million to around five million (Travis 2005, p.1)) overall adult