So I’ve been doing some work for uni (read 10 journal articles and summarise them all. Fun!!!) and I thought CC would just love to get their teeth into this. One of the articles I’ve been reading talks about youth, politics, and how to engage younger people in politics. Overall participation in elections has been dropping for years, but in 2009 only 29% of young people aged 18-24 voted, and studies have found people are less likely to vote throughout their lives if they don’t vote when they are first able to.

The proposals in this article to increase youth voting includes:

1. Educating secondary school pupils and those in vocational training colleges

2. Lowering the voting age to 16

3. Local youth councils

4. EU countries have independent youth parliaments

5. Electronic voting

6. Politicians should be more in touch with younger voters

How do you feel about this? Is there anything you think will work better than others? Is there anything you can think of that could work better than these?

If you want any clarification or more detail on any of these, please ask

If you would like to read the article for yourself (it’s not ridiculously long) then google: Bringing Politics to the Youth: How to Generate Interest in Electoral Politics by kyranakis and nurvala

Also I’d like to let you know this is a European piece of research and is not as applicable to other areas of the world