ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that young adults to vote in Super Bowl-style elections is becoming more and more of a problem in the United States and many other established democracies. It then turns to second-order elections, where the age gap in terms of electoral participation has reached alarming levels in many countries. The early comparative research on parliamentary elections hardly mentioned turnout at all. Scholarly neglect of this subject occurred mainly because, unlike in the United States, turnout levels were typically very high elsewhere in the established democratic world. It would be a mistake to blame the recent decline of turnout in many countries on the lowering of the voting age. Mark Franklin is right to point to the problem of a lack of political skills among newly eligible voters in recent years. Young adults in the 21st century have low levels of newspaper reading, TV news watching, or political knowledge.
