ABSTRACT
It is commonplace to refer to a crisis of youth participation in American electoral politics and in many other nations as well. Recent citizen cohorts are easily characterised as coming up short on a number of traditional civic engagement indicators, especially voting (Putnam 2000). This pattern echoes through societies in which young people increasingly sense that politics and political discourse do not address them. Although it is impossible to identify true turnout rates by age group in any given year, Levine and Lopez estimate that in the 2000 US elections only 37 per cent of Americans aged 18 to 25 cast ballots, compared to the national average of 51 per cent.1 In the off-year elections of 2002 and 1998, only 17 per cent of young Americans voted – significantly lower than the national turnout rate.2 This is troubling, though perhaps unsurprising, given that relatively few candidates seem to make appeals to young voters, and the political consultants who have become brokers in the relationships between citizens and representatives feel that young people are hard to reach and even harder to convince. Research on political participation suggests that one of the most important elements in taking part in politics is being asked to do so in some way (Schier, 2000; Verba et al., 1995).
