I was reading a news story a few days ago that said that Elections B.C. wants to try to attract youth voters in the upcoming election. The idea is to engage with young voters beyond university and colleges campuses. This is a laudable goal and over the last number of years there have been efforts in many places to raise the number of youth voters. It seems to me however that something more substantial has to change before we see a rush of young people asserting their democratic rights.
I remember a few years ago the Oscars award show executives had the great idea to hire two young (might we saw youthful) actors to host the show in order to boost the ratings of the younger demographic. Unfortunately, Anne Hathaway and James Franco forgot to bring the youthful part of the show along. Yes, they were in their late twenties / early thirties but they proceeded to do the old soft shoe just like every other host in Oscar history. You know what I mean? They read the same stale jokes off the same slow moving teleprompter that only people with 20/20 vision can see. Oscar executives could not simply add a youth dressing to a very old model. An award show is an award show. Some people get awards and some people don't. Some people give appropriate speeches and some people don't. It is fairly formulaic and most of us sit around with bowls of potato chips waiting for the last award to be given which is the only one we really care about. Ok, enough with the Oscar analogy. My point is that it is difficult to make something appear important to a whole demographic of people who have otherwise disengaged.
A very interesting scholarly article in the Journal of Youth Studies entitled, "Change in political era and demographic weight as an explanation of youth disenfranchisement in federal elections in Canada, 1965-2000," does an excellent job of highlighting the difficulties of bringing youth to the election table.
Margaret Adsett argues that two fundamental explanations of youth disengagement have been overlooked. Her study, as you can see in the title, posits the idea that youth have become more disengaged from the political process as the political era has changed and as the percentage of young people in Canada has declined against the growing number of aging baby boomers. In other words, there are less youth than there are older people.
Adsett tells us that there has been an ideological shift away from welfare economics to what is known as neo-liberalism. She says that from the 1960s until the end of the Trudeau era in 1984, Canada was a "pan-Canadian" country with values that were marked by principles of a "just society," fairness and equality. These values, she suggests, are the values that attract young people to politics. But, post 1984 politics was marked by the rise of new ideas about cutting taxes and reducing the size of government (in 2013 this is called "entitlement reduction"). This shift, Adsett argues, makes politics less appealing to youth because the decline in government programs means a decline in programs that impact youth.
The second important reason that Adsett posits for the decline in youth turnout is that because the cohort itself is smaller in comparison to the larger cohort of older Canadians. Election campaigns get skewed toward issues of concern to an aging population or, as she says, "economically active and established" voters. Adsett highlights the kind of policies that seem to slip out of focus, like "special tax deductions for child care" or the disappearance of plans for "a national child care program."
While Adsett's data ends in the year 2000 and her argument is directed at federal elections, it seems to me that we could apply these same trends to British Columbia.
I will wait to see if election platforms can really be directed at youth. If health care funding and tax cuts are at the core of election promises without any real substantive programs that interest and pertain to young people then I am not sure what will be there to attract youth to the show.
