ABSTRACT
Scholarly interest in youth and politics has waxed and waned with the times. Voting in elections is a major dependent variable in political science. Since age determines eligibility and since lower numbers of youth tend to vote, they have often been ignored. The intersection of youth and politics attracts attention when concerns about the younger generation’s political interest and commitments intensify. Trends pointing to declines in conventional forms of engagement in younger generations has spurred today’s interest. In any era, 18-25 year-olds are less likely than their elders to vote, to belong to political parties, or to read newspapers. However, young people today are also less likely than earlier generations of youth to get engaged in these ways (Levine 2007). As scholarly attention has increased, the definition of civic engagement has expanded.
In this chapter, the terms civic and political are used interchangeably based on the equivalence of the terms in the political theorist, Michael Walzer’s definition:
