Postmaterialism and young people's political participation in a time of austerity

Abstract

Recent trends suggest that young people in Britain are refraining from engaging in formal political processes. At the same time, they are increasingly expressing support for, and turning toward, a new and diverse range of non-institutionalized forms of political action in order to actualize their interests. Using Inglehart's ideas on postmaterialism, we consider whether this apparent rejection of mainstream politics in favour of less conventional - and sometimes radical - forms of political action is changing over time in Britain, reflecting fluctuating economic conditions witnessed over the last two decades. We do this by comparing results from surveys of British 18 year olds conducted in 2002 during an era of relative global prosperity, and then in 2011 at the height of the current global crisis. The findings suggest that British young postmaterialists are considerably more likely than materialists to participate in and support both institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms of political action.

Towards a Conceptualization of Young People’s Political Engagement: A Qualitative Focus Group Study

“…Furthermore, participants did not refer to voting when discussing the main political engagement indicators-similar to other studies [17,82]. Recent evidence suggests that nowadays, young people prefer to engage with NGOs rather than with political parties because such organizations allow them to support particular issues they care about while not having to align to an entire package of political items [83]. This may explain why, in the present study, some of the items commonly chosen by young people as indicators of political engagement were linked to the community (e.g., promoting information and mobilization in the community to sustain political programs they believed in).…”

Political Consumerism as a Neoliberal Response to Youth Political Disengagement

“…The relevance of postmaterialist value preferences to political consumerism thus becomes pertinent. Firstly, buycotting and boycotting, as an expression of political action, are consistent with the lifestyle and the non-conventional participation methods that are popular among the postmaterialist cohorts [83]. Secondly, instead of consuming merely to satisfy one's material needs, the political consumer adds ethical, social, environmental, and political-hence, postmaterialist-considerations to the product of choice.…”

“…Inglehart's [20][21][22] postmaterialist thesis posits that increasing material security has resulted in a shift in people's value orientations which enables them to place more emphasis on concerns related to self-expression, human rights, and environmental issues [83]. Moreover, previous research indicates that political consumerism is primarily a tool of young postmaterialists, who are distrustful of political institutions [84].…”

Youthquake 2017

“…This has implications for our understandings of why young people turn out to vote in transformative elections. It suggests that many young people will turn out to vote when they can identify with the issues emphasized by a candidate or party -a point reinforced by evidence from Henn et al (2017).…”