Why have young people stopped voting in droves? That, at least, was the dominant question for those studying the way young people engaged with politics in Britain before 2017. So-called millennials, who came of age politically at the turn of the millennium, voted in numbers well below those of their parents and grandparents at the same age. In 2015, for example, the British Election Study found that around 57 per cent of millennials reported voting, compared with an average of 79 per cent of older generations. When many millennials first voted in 2005, around 49 per cent cast a ballot, compared with an average of 74 per cent of their elders. The equivalent figures for the ’90s generation in 1997 were 64 per cent and 82 per cent; for the ’80s generation in 1987, 71 per cent and 82 per cent; and for the ’60s/’70s generation in 1974, 80 per cent and 89 per cent.
The conventional explanation was that young people cared about the issues of the day but felt excluded from traditional party politics. They were not less interested in politics than their elders but alienated from it. This claim is repeatedly invoked by those promoting policies such as lowering the voting age to increase youth turnout, and challenging it has become controversial and likely to be dismissed as blaming the young for the failures of the political elite.
The 2017 general election seemed to provide proof of this view of the world, with young people brought spectacularly back to the fold by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, his methods of campaigning, and policies such as the abolition of tuition fees. This allegedly drove young people back to the polling stations and denied the Conservative Party their majority in the House of Commons, in what on election night became known as a ‘youthquake’.
There is little question that young voters overwhelmingly supported Labour in 2017 – but there are serious doubts about the existence of a ‘youthquake’ or that this marks a reversal of decades of low turnout among politically alienated young people.
Discounting the more ridiculous ‘evidence’ (such as photographs of young people standing outside polling stations on election night, or a claim of 72 per cent youth turnout tweeted by Labour MP David Lammy based on data that did not exist), the initial estimates of turnout that spawned the ‘youthquake’ claim were based on online polls. Estimates of the change in turnout for 18–24-year-olds (or 18–29s) between 2015 and 2017 ranged from 12 points in an exit poll conducted by NME to 21 points in a report by the Intergenerational Foundation (see the table below).
Online polls are, however, quite poor for estimating turnout because their samples are biased towards people who are interested in politics (and so more likely to vote), and because survey respondents have a well-established tendency to lie about voting (as discussed in the previous chapter).
More reliable estimates can be obtained from surveys that collect their data face-to-face and are better at recruiting representative samples. Three such surveys have showed that claims of a dramatic surge in youth turnout were misguided: the British Social Attitudes survey, Understanding Society and the British Election Study. The last is particularly important because it matches its respondents to the electoral register, making it the only survey that can check whether voters who say they voted actually did so. These surveys do not produce a consistent estimate of the change in youth turnout – ranging from negligible change to 8 points – but they are clear that there was nothing indicative of a ‘youthquake’.
TURNOUT FOR YOUNG VOTERS IN 2017 (%)
| SURVEY | ESTIMATED TURNOUT | ESTIMATED CHANGE 2015 TO 2017 |
| Intergenerational Foundation | 64 | 21 |
| Essex Continuous Monitoring Survey | 61* | 19 |
| Ipsos MORI | 54 | 16 |
| NME | 53 | 12 |
| Understanding Society | 66 | 8 |
| British Social Attitudes | 61 | 6 |
| British Election Study | 43 | Negligible |
Note: * Estimate of turnout for under-thirties rather than 18–24-year-olds.
There is no evidence that 2017 saw a change in the political engagement or alienation of young people either. Claims that young people are a politically alienated generation have long suffered from an impoverished understanding of ‘political alienation’ – a phrase that many use but few bother to define. The American political scientist Ada Finifter distinguished three types of political alienation: i) powerlessness (feeling unable to influence the political process); ii) normlessness (feeling that the rules governing fair political interaction are not being respected); and iii) meaninglessness (a lack of confidence that one can find meaning in politics because of a lack of understanding).
When we measure these traits in millennials, alongside their political interest, we find that they are characterised by an unusually low level of interest in politics and unusually low levels of political alienation. For example, even after accounting for the influence of their stage in the life cycle and short-term events that might affect how people feel about the political process, data from the British Social Attitudes survey between 1983 and 2012 showed that millennials were typically 8 percentage points more likely to have little or no interest in politics than older generations. At the same time, they were 9 points less likely to feel that politicians did not listen to them (powerlessness), and 6 points less likely to feel that politicians could not be trusted (normlessness). The only form of alienation for which they were worse off was meaninglessness: millennials were 6 points more likely to feel that politics was too complicated to understand.
These trends did not change after the 2017 election: a YouGov survey after polling day showed that millennials were less likely than their elders to agree that politicians could not be trusted or that politicians did not care what they thought and less likely to feel they could understand politics. The British Election Study, meanwhile, showed that 17 per cent of millennials had no interest at all in politics, compared with 10 per cent of the wider electorate.
This all matters not just because the conventional view of potentially alienated youth or claims of a ‘youthquake’ are both wrong but because they are also potentially harmful. They not only incorrectly imply that there is no longer a need to worry about low youth turnout but also provide another excuse to overlook the key driver behind that trend: their declining interest in politics.
Examples of research arguing that the millennials are politically alienated include Young People and Politics in the UK: Apathy or Alienation? by David Marsh and colleagues (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Claims of a ‘youthquake’ can be found in Matt Henn and James Sloam’s book Youthquake 2017: The Rise of Young Cosmopolitans in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and ‘Why 2017 may have witnessed a Youthquake after all’ by Will Jennings and Patrick Sturgis (LSE British Politics and Policy, 2018). Challenges to the ‘youthquake’ can be found in ‘The Myth of the 2017 Youthquake Election’ and ‘Youthquake – a reply to our critics’, both available on the British Election Study website. The definition and dimensions of political alienation can be found in Ada Finifter’s ‘Dimensions of Political Alienation’ (American Political Science Review, 1970).