The YES Project
Youth participation in the electoral process is of great concern in Western democracies today. For many years we have known that young people are less likely to enroll to votethan older groups. This national study is attempting to uncover the reasons why this is so and also look at what motivates Australia’s young people to participate.
This four year research project is a major national study by a team of researchers from the University of Sydney and the Australian National University working in conjunction with the Australian Electoral Commission. The research is funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), through its ARC Linkage Grants program, as well as the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC). The project is being administered through the University of Sydney.
The Chief Investigators for the project are A/Professor Murray Print (Centre for Research & Teaching in Civics, University of Sydney) and Dr. Larry Saha (Reader in Sociology, ANU), together with Dr Kathy Edwards as Senior Research Associate. The Partner Investigator isBrien Hallett (Assistant Commissioner, Public Awareness, Media and Research, AEC). The Steering Committee is composed of the following: Brien Hallett , Andrew Moyes (Assistant Commissioners, AEC), David Farrell (NSW/AEC), A/Prof Murray Print, Dr. Larry Saha and Dr. Kathy Edwards. Project Objectives The principal purpose of the project is to determine why many young people do not register on the Australian electoral roll. It has been estimated that there are approximately 300,000 young Australians, 18-25 years of age who do not vote in elections because they have not registered.
Apart from the fact that voting is compulsory, the under-registration of eligible young people raises questions about their political interest and commitment.
A more fundamental purpose is to investigate the impact of disengaged youth on Australian democracy. Large numbers of non-participating youth have implications for the effectiveness and future of the Australian democratic political system. Thus the project is investigating the underlying characteristics of those who do and do not register when they become eligible at age 17, and is focusing on the links between pro-voting behaviour and family, school and other social and psychological variables. The meaning of voting and other forms of active citizenship by Australian youth is being examined. Various current intervention strategies to improve registration will be analysed and new strategies will be proposed and developed.
Youth Electoral Study – Report 1: Enrolment and Voting
Youth participation in the electoral process is of great concern in many democracies today. For many years we have known that young people are less likely to enrol to vote than older groups. The Youth Electoral Study (YES) is a national study attempting to uncover the reasons why this is so and also look at what motivates Australia’s young people to participate in voting.
This four year national project is a major investigation into youth voting behaviour led by a team of researchers from the University of Sydney and the Australian National University working in conjunction with the Australian Electoral Commission. The research is funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), through its ARC Linkage Grants program, with a major contribution from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) as industry partner. The project is being administered through the University of Sydney.
The Chief Investigators for the project are A/Professor Murray Print (Centre for Research & Teaching in Civics, University of Sydney) and Dr. Larry Saha (Reader in Sociology, ANU), together with Dr Kathy Edwards as Senior Research Associate. The Partner Investigator is Brien Hallett (Assistant Commissioner, Public Awareness , Media and Research, AEC). The Project Officer from the AEC, until recently, has been Ms. Yvonne Harrison (NSW/AEC). The Steering Committee is composed of the following: Brien Hallett , Andrew Moyes (Assistant Commissioner Enrolment and Parliamentary Services, AEC), David Farrell (Australian Electoral Officer for NSW, AEC), Yvonne Harrison, (NSW/AEC), A/Prof Murray Print, Dr.Larry Saha and Dr. Kathy Edwards. Project Objectives The principal purpose of the project is to determine why many young people do not register on the Australian electoral roll despite compulsory enrolment and voting provisions in legislation.
The AEC estimates indicate that at the 2004 electoral roll close, approximately 82% young Australians (17-25 years of age) were enrolled (compared with 95% of other Australians), on the electoral roll. Apart from the fact that enrolment and voting are compulsory, the registration of eligible young people raises questions about their political interest and commitment to their civic responsibility.
A more fundamental purpose of YES is to investigate the impact of disengaged youth on Australian democracy. Large numbers of non-participating youth have implications for the effectiveness and representativeness of our political system. Should this trend continue, the future viability of the Australian democratic political system may become problematic.
Thus the project is investigating the underlying characteristics of those who do and do not register when they become eligible at age 17, and is focusing on the links between pro-voting behaviour and family, school and other social and psychological variables. The meaning of voting and other forms of active citizenship by Australian youth is being examined. Various current intervention strategies to improve registration will be analysed for their impact and new strategies examined.
Download: Youth Electoral Study – Report 1: Enrolment and Voting
Youth Electoral Study – Report 2: Youth, Political Engagement and Voting
Enrolment and voting are behaviours which are normally associated with “active citizenship”, particularly if they are voluntary and not compulsory. Furthermore, in most discussions of citizenship voting is seen as a minimum requirement in fulfilling one’s responsibilities as a citizen, but it is not seen as the only activity which qualifies as citizenship behaviour (Saha, 2000a).
But can one be an active citizen without voting?
Most researchers recognise that there are many political behaviours that can be included in the notion of “active citizenship” which are more community-oriented and policy-oriented, such as volunteer work and other projects designed to eliminate community problems. For example, in her survey of 18-34 year-old Australians, Vromen (2003a) adopted a broad conceptualisation of political behaviour that included 19 “participatory acts” which, by means of principle components analysis, were reduced to four scales: “individualistic”, “party”, “communitarian” and “activist”. Vromen found that her young Australians were more politically active than many people recognise (almost all had participated in at least one activity) and that:
1) women were more active in communitarian and activist activities,
2) those with more education were more active overall, and
3) individualised activities were more numerous than collective activities.
Voting, however, was not one of the 19 activities, and while these findings are important in their own right, we still need to understand the link between forms of political activism and voting.
Westheimer and Kahn (2004) argued that there are three types of citizen and labeled them as: 1) Personally responsible citizen (obey laws, contributes to good causes, recycles, gives blood, etc; 2) The Participatory citizen (volunteers for community work, joins community or social groups, helps organise programs to help others etc; and 3) The Justice-oriented citizen (critically assesses the causes of social problems, and works actively to alleviate them). After their study of two civics education school projects, they concluded that these three types of citizenship behaviour may be discreet and that they can be taught separately in civics and citizenship classes in schools.
Once again, Westheimer and Kahne included behaviours such as political interest, and intention to volunteer; they did not include the intention to vote or voting. Some researchers argue that “active citizenship” behaviours are linked and overlap (Youniss & Yates, 1999), and further, that they are related to voting. For example, Verba and his colleagues (Verba, Schlozman, & Brady, 1995) found in their study of American adults that voting and community activity tended to go together. In addition, they found that many adult “active citizens” had already been active while still in school. But the question of voting and citizenship takes on a different perspective in the Australian context given that voting is legally required and therefore compulsory for citizens (Hallett, 1999).
In other words, do people vote merely to obey the law, or do they vote because they want to be participative citizens? The many behaviours included in the above research, whether at the individual or community level, are usually regarded as forms of political engagement and also include activities such as signing petitions, writing letters and even participating in forms of public display of consent or dissent with government policies or actions. These latter activities occur in the form of rallies or demonstrations connected with various social movements, and have sometimes been referred to as the “politics of the future” (Jennett & Stewart, 1989) or “new politics” (Pakulski, 1991).
In this report we focus on the link between various forms of political activity reported by Australian youth, and their intention to vote. In addressing this issue, we highlight some of our findings from the 2004 national survey of 4855 senior secondary school students, from 153 schools, drawn randomly from an inclusive national list. The response rate of targeted schools was 74%. We also utilise the group interview data collected from sixteen electoral divisions. (See Print, Saha and Edwards, 2004 for a more detailed description of the YES project.) We focus specifically on the behaviours which we define as indicating political engagement among Australian youth, and we examine how these behaviours are related to their voting intentions. As voting is compulsory in Australia for federal and state elections, there are two items in the YES questionnaire which measure voting intention.
The first simply asks the student if he or she will vote when they reach 18 years of age. The second asks whether they would vote in a Federal election if they did not have to. In our first YES report, we pointed out that while 87% of the students said they would vote in a Federal election, only 50% said they would still vote if it were not compulsory. (Print, Saha, & Edwards, 2004)
Download: Youth Electoral Study – Report 2: Youth, Political Engagement and Voting
Youth Electoral Study – Report 3: Youth, The Family, and Learning About Politics and Voting
The aim of this report is to consider what we have learnt from YES about how and what young people learn about politics, voting and enrolling to vote from their families. The influence of the family on political behaviour has a long history as a subject of research.
One of the best sources for an overview of this literature is Niemi and Sobieszek (1977), which describes the field of political socialisation. The seminal text that defined this discipline is generally agreed to be Hyman’s Political Socialization: A Study in The Psychology of Political Behavior (1959).
Others such as Renshon’s Handbook of Political Socialization (Renshon 1977) have also been influential. The foundational argument of political socialisation was the hypothesis that, although ‘politics’ was an adult activity, attitudes about politics were gained at a very young age. The aim was to understand the stability of Western democracies through an analysis of how democratic and other political norms were transferred through the generations. Political socialisation identified a number of sites for the transmission of political norms, values and attitudes, including schools, the media and, most significantly, the family (Beck and Jennings 1991; Jennings and Niemi 1971; Jennings and Niemi 1968, 1971).
Reflecting its mixed parentage of political science and psychology most studies carried out in the name of ‘political socialisation’ adopted a rigid quantitative approach based on written closed-question surveys. Particular emphasis was placed on attitudes toward authority, recognition of political persons, understanding of institutions and trust in accepted norms. Most of these studies concerned the political socialisation of children in the USA. Among them, however, was R.W. Connell’s The Child’s Construction of Politics (Connell, 1971) that aimed at understanding how Australian children learned about and understood politics. Connell’s intention was to understand whether political values, including a commitment to conservative politics, could be transmissible through the generations. But this new political socialisation literature failed to live up to its promise of understanding the complexity of the formation of political attitudes.
As early as 1968 studies highlighting ‘major problems’ in the theory and methodology of political socialisation began to appear (Dennis 1968). For a start, although earlier studies of the transmission of political values from parent to child discovered high degrees of correlation in parent-child values, later studies using different methodologies questioned this. Assumptions made about the passivity of children as subjects within the process of socialisation were also challenged.
By the 1980’s studies of political socialisation had all but vanished and researchers turned to a meta-analysis of the objectives and methodology of the discipline. In 1987 Connell was confident in asserting that the discipline had ‘failed’ (Connell 1987). Yet, even Connell asked, ‘what should replace it’? And studies mooting a ‘return to political socialisation’ continually appear (Dudley and Gitelson 2002; Sears 1990). Clearly there is something about the subject of political socialisation that engages researchers. Civics and Citizenship Education programmes widely found in the education systems of many Western democracies including Australia, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom are testimony to a principle that as a normative practice both the family and the school should prepare young people to enter the world as ‘active citizens’ aware of their rights, duties and able to understand the mechanisms of the state and political institutions. Also accepted is that young people do not emerge as adults as ‘blank slates’, but as already having some views about politics and democratic participation. At the time that young people in Australia are eligible to enrol to vote (at the age of 17) and required to enrol and vote in any elections (at the age of 18) they already hold some attitudes towards democracy, political views and opinions about the social and political landscape of Australia.
This was clearly demonstrated in previous YES reports that showed that many young people have protested and others have positions on what they think about voting as a democratic act (Print, Saha and Edwards 2004; Saha, Print and Edwards 2005).
To this end, in the literatures on education and political science more broadly, the subject of children’s and adolescents’ learning about politics remains a subject of analysis. Most studies highlight the role played by ‘the family’ as a site of political learning. The International Education Association (IEA), for example, in its study of civic learning identified the family asa major variable (Torney-Purta et al. 2001). In relation to voting specifically studies also highlight the benefits of positive reinforcement through discussion in the family about politics (Andolina et. al. 2003) and through parents taking young children to the polling booth (Meirick and Wackman 2004).
YES reported in Enrolment and Voting (Print, Saha, & Edwards, 2004), that survey respondents identified ‘the family’ as the most important source of information about voting in elections, followed by the television, newspapers and teachers (See Table 1 in that report).
Participants in our focus groups identified the same sources as being important in terms of finding out about politics and voting. Taking into account some of the pitfalls encountered by previous attempts to understand and theorise ‘the family’, it is therefore important that we explore the family as a source of political learning, information, discussion and knowledge for young Australians.
To summarise, the fundamental problem in research about young people and political learning seems to be how to understand the process of learning about politics without lapsing into determinism. With respect to the family the issue appears to be how to understand the family as an important arena in which young people learn about politics without conceptualisingyoung people as simple products of familial conditioning.
The following discussion of young people and political learning in the family thus considers the young person as an active subject. We do not presume that the young person is a simple product of familial socialisation such that they merely replicate parental perspectives. Nor do we presume that their views are entrenched and static. Rather we consider that we have interviewed subjects at a pivotal period in their career as ‘political subjects’ and as Australian citizens, the years around which they will gain the citizen’s right and duty of the franchise, and this is placed in the context of the primary research problem – why do many of these young people not register to vote?
Download: Youth Electoral Study – Report 3: Youth, The Family, and Learning About Politics and Voting
About djwright
