Why Disruption is Key to Political Engagement of Youth
By Spiro Kiousis and Michael McDevitt
The recent midterm elections marked the lowest voter turnout since 1940, according to some analysts, and while turnout for youth held steady, only one in five young adults eligible to vote did vote in 2014.
The 21.5 percent turnout for voters 18–29 was close to the average for the last 20 years of midterm elections, as reported by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). Commentary in the post-election season is likewise predictable, with schools, news media, and political parties named as primary culprits.
Perhaps the time has come to flip the paradigm of youth civic and political engagement, and we mean that quite literally in how we imagine the direction of influence in schools and families.
In political science, traditional models adopt a top-down approach for developing citizens as childhood transitions into adolescence and ultimately the adult years of habitual voting or disengagement. In other words, the impetus and responsibility for development lies with schools, parents, and other agents of political socialization. This assumption leads to the seemingly realistic view of youth as passive participants in their own civic growth.
Studies we have conducted out of the College of Media, Communication, and Information at the University of Colorado and the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida suggest that youth are not a problem to be fixed, but represent an opportunity for reviving electoral democracy. In our view, the actual problem resides in the low expectations of scholars, many teachers, and parents. Adolescents are best viewed as active rather than passive, conflict seeking rather than conflict avoidant, and leaders rather than followers in exchanges of political opinions.
While incivility and hyper-partisanship characterizes how many adults participate in politics, we must nonetheless accept the need for conflict in youth development. Disruption may be the key. In “Active Political Parenting: Youth Contributions During Election Campaigns,” we describe a scenario of developmental provocation, whereby youth political engagement accounts for parents realizing that childrearing extends to the civic realm. Political parenting tends to be reactive rather than proactive, and in many families parents need some kind of a wakeup call. A sports analogy captures the dynamic. A give-and-go in basketball occurs when a player with the ball passes to a teammate and repositions herself for a return pass. In developmental provocation, a son or daughter signals interest in politics, prompting a parenting response. The act of giving — the showing of youth expertise — is rewarded by a parent, who returns the favor by coaxing further political development sometime in the future.
The study is published in Social Science Quarterly. While we had previously documented “trickle-up influence” of youth on parents in low-income and Latino immigrant families, “Active Political Parenting” represents the first study that models parenting as a dependent variable — as an outcome rather than a stimulus to family interaction. We identified the 2002 and 2004 election cycles as ideal for documenting developmental provocation due to the unfolding of youth opposition to the U.S. and U.K. invasion of Ba’athist Iraq. In the spring of 2004, the Pentagon struggled to enlist troops large enough to confront popular resistance in Iraq. While a military draft had been abolished 30 years earlier, rumors of reinstitution circulated, a situation likely discussed in families with teenagers and young adults.
We interviewed about 500 parent-youth dyads in Arizona, Colorado, and Florida. Adolescent respondents were juniors and seniors during a midterm campaign, and old enough to vote during the subsequent presidential election. Youth news attention, opposition to U.S. military involvement, and first-time voting predicted intentional political parenting in 2004. The corresponding measures of parent political engagement were meager predictors in comparison. In 2002, student participation in classroom discussion about the campaign also prompted parents to become more active in political parenting, an influence still evident when youth and parents were re-interviewed in 2004.
In related research, we have found that civic instruction and school interventions that emphasize dialogue, open debate, and listening to opposing viewpoints lead to increased political engagement of youth and their parents. By contrast, assessments of traditional civics instruction often show that rote memorization and didactic instruction inculcate passive citizenship. Interactive curricula stimulate communication via news media use, discussion with peers, and discussion with parents, and these deliberative outcomes are accompanied by political knowledge, refined evaluations of issues and candidates, and increased probability of voting for both youth and parents.
The stimulation of student-parent discussion is the mechanism through which parents benefit in their own civic engagement. In essence, this can function as a second chance at citizenship for parents previously disenchanted with politics. These same parents are often defensive when classroom discussions spill over into the family, but they soon realize that they need to educate themselves about issues if they want to retain a leadership role in family political communication.
Our research highlights the value of conflict seeking and deliberation in youth expression, and we reject the prevailing view of political socialization as internalization and conflict avoidance. There is no better way to ensure that adults will be defensive and uncomfortable with political discussion than to extract politics from civic education. Encouraging youth to talk about contentious issues will not bring about a Lord of the Rings scenario of disrespect, narcissism, and scorn for tradition.
Several recommendations emerge from our studies. First, high schools should incorporate civics instruction that allows students to express a wide range of views on salient issues that are important to them. Similarly, news media should work with schools to cover issues and problems that resonate with students, prompting discussion and debate.
Parents should be tolerant of rigorous debate at school. They should support, rather than threaten, teachers who enliven classrooms with discussions about issues such as immigration, the Dream Act, global warming, and militarization of community police.
Curricula modules should be designed to activate proactive, political parenting. For examples, teenagers could role-play as reporters to interview parents about their history of voting and about their ballot choices as Election Day nears.
Finally, this nation needs a Civic Parenting Day. We need something on the calendar to remind parents that childhood’s end does not have to lead to another generation of incivility.
Spiro Kiousis is Executive Associate Dean and Professor of Public Relations in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. Michael McDevitt is Professor in the newly created College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder.
