Getting Youth to Vote

Getting young people politically involved, informed, and taking the time to actually vote is a challenge.  Here's a new article by folks dedicated to this from across the pond in the U.K.  One way to solve the problem, it's argued, is to integrate politics into the curriculum.

Politics student Shirley Tetteh believes much of the fault lies with the education system. Embedding politics into the curriculum from year three onwards would improve young people's understanding, she believes. "We aren't engaged in politics because we aren't told how it affects us," she says.

In the U.S., of course, you'd probably find yourself quickly enmeshed in one of those tiring partisan debates over what kind of information to provide.

Also voting should be easier, they say.

Alex Davis, 19, turned up to vote but was turned away by polling staff. "I registered online but when I got to the polling station they told me I wasn't on the list. I was supposed to print out the form I filled in and send it off. They said lots of people had experienced the same problem - they didn't make it clear enough."

For those of us who have been voting for a million years in the U.S., it doesn't seem that daunting a task.  But for younger people who see the world in a different -- and digital -- way, then I suspect it seems overly complicated and difficult and somehow involves a thing called paper.

Finally, and this is from my own observations, the news doesn't connect with young people for lots of reasons, including how we (the royal we, as in journalists, not the royal family) craft our stories.  The inverted pyramid, which I love, is not designed to make life easier for someone just learning about public affairs.  It's written with the newest, most important information first, which is fine if you come to a story with a base of knowledge.  Come to it fresh and that same story structure gets in the way more than it informs.

Political Information Efficacy?

Sometimes you discover a familiar friend with a new name.  It happens all the time in social science, especially if you read across disciplines.  A political scientist might call a concept by one label, a psychologist by another, and a mass comm scholar, oh we'll come up with one of our own.

So when I read this study about political information efficacy, it was like finding an old friend.

Kaid and her colleagues in an American Behavioral Science article attack the question of low political participation among young adults by looking also at not only their political knowledge, but their confidence in their knowledge.   Or, as they write:

Our own research suggests that there is yet another reason for concern about low levels of political information and accurate knowledge among young citizens. We have found a strong relationship between young voters’ perceptions or confidence in their political knowledge and the likelihood that they will exercise their right to vote.

Political efficacy is traditionally broken into either external efficacy (beliefs in the government's responsiveness) and internal efficacy (one's own competence to handle the complexities of political discourse). "Our theory of political information efficacy," the authors write, "is closely related to internal efficacy but differs in that it focuses solely on the voter’s confidence in his or her own political knowledge and its sufficiency to engage the political process (to vote)." 

In other words, perceived knowledge. 

Find Note 4 in the study and you discover the items used to measure political information efficacy.  Oh hell, I'll save you the trouble.  They are, on a 5-point agree-disagree continuum:

•  I consider myself well qualified to participate in politics
• I think that I am better informed about politics and government than most people
• I feel that I have a pretty good understanding of the important political issues facing our country
• If a friend asked me about the presidential election, I feel I would have enough information to help my friend figure out who to vote for.
  

The internal consistency or reliability seems fine, with a reported Cronbach's Alpha of .87.  No surprise there.  They all measure the same thing -- Internal Efficacy.  But it sounds cooler if you come up with your own label and call it a theory; you get scholarly bonus points.  It's a helluva good study, but I'm just saying ...

So what did they find?  Ahhh, young grasshopper, that is a blog post for another day.  Stay tuned, because I'll talk not only about the findings but whether they mean anything today.

Younger and Smarter

According to the Pew Center for the People and the Press, younger voters are bucking the trend when it comes to campaign knowledge. Usually age is a positive predictor of knowledge, which means the older you are, the better you tend to do on the various ways we measure the concept.

Not so much, this year. In fact, just the opposite.

Sixty percent of voters 18-29 correctly identify Obama as being pro-choice, while only 51 percent of voters ages 50-64 got it right. Only 41 percent of those 65 and older nailed the question.

Most everyone did better in identifying candidate positions on Iraq than they did on abortion.

So what's going on?

In part this is an Obama Effect. He energized young voters, enough so that they were a little more likely to pay attention and get the answer right. I'm frankly surprised that they pulled ahead of older respondents instead of merely pulling even. That's damn surprising given the usually significant age effect we see on knowledge. Maybe there's something different about abortion as an issue. Maybe something else is at work here.

Coming Soon to a Blog Near You

In honor of the upcoming presidential debate, I'll write tomorrow or the next day on what we know from the research on debates and post-debate analysis. Do debate performances change minds? Do people learn from the debates? Do zingers matter, as in "you're no Jack Kennedy" in 1988 or President Ford's infamous freeing of Poland in 1976? And how about those talking heads who later tell us what we just saw, what effect do they have on public opinion?

More later.