Indications that Millennial voters could sway key states in the 2016 election make the question of what drives politically active young people particularly salient for candidates struggling to win them over. Researchers Ariadne Vromen at the University of Sydney, Michael Xenos at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Brian Loader at the University of York, set out to determine which political issues young people care about, how Millennials perceive economic inequality, and how social media informs political engagement. We asked them to explain their results and their implications for 2016.
ResearchGate: What motivated you to study young people’s political engagement and perspectives on inequality?
Ariadne Vromen and Michael Xenos: We recently completed a comparative research project on whether heightened social media use reduced political inequality in the United States, Australia, and Great Britain. That is, among this generation of networked young citizens, do traditional indicators of who is the most politically engaged still dominate? Is it only the voices of the wealthiest, most educated, and most politically interested who are active in politics? The results were a qualified no: that social media plays an equalizing role, providing young people with both information and spaces to become politically engaged. However, there is still a gulf between those already interested and paying attention to politics, and those who are not.
To try and explain some of these differences among young people we asked them what political issues are important to them and need political attention, also looking at how they recognized and understood inequality in their societies. In all three countries, there is a burgeoning debate about how this will be the first generation to go backwards economically, and in the United States and U.K., young people were at the forefront of the effects of the global financial crisis. We suspected that their understandings of inequality would shape their desire or not to become engaged in political action for social change.
