ABSTRACT
Old people vote, young people don’t. This is the message coming out of much of the academic and popular literature on young people and voting. In this literature young people are depicted as ritual non-voters as compared to older regular voters who are holding up their end of the civic bargain. Book titles such as Is Voting for Young People? (Wattenberg, 2006) typify the tenor of much of the literature on voter turnout among the young. But does this hold true for the Anglo-American democracies? Would this chapter be more appropriately titled ‘why don’t young people vote’?
