Youth Interests, Party Manifestos and the Media

This study focused on the extent to which British political parties made pledges and policies for youth in their 2010 election manifestos to motivate them to vote and the extent to which these policies were subsequently reflected in the news to enable the youth to be informed of the policies that are relevant for them. Previous literature has argued that political parties are to blame for low youth voter turnout but these arguments were based on survey studies among young people and no research had been conducted on the actual policies parties make for youth. Content analysis was carried out on the election manifestos of the three biggest parties in the UK and news articles by three online news sources to determine the attention given to young people. The results showed that very few pledges were made specifically for young people in the manifestos but that news media did report about these pledges fairly often. It was concluded that the political parties offer young people very...Show moreThis study focused on the extent to which British political parties made pledges and policies for youth in their 2010 election manifestos to motivate them to vote and the extent to which these policies were subsequently reflected in the news to enable the youth to be informed of the policies that are relevant for them. Previous literature has argued that political parties are to blame for low youth voter turnout but these arguments were based on survey studies among young people and no research had been conducted on the actual policies parties make for youth. Content analysis was carried out on the election manifestos of the three biggest parties in the UK and news articles by three online news sources to determine the attention given to young people. The results showed that very few pledges were made specifically for young people in the manifestos but that news media did report about these pledges fairly often. It was concluded that the political parties offer young people very little motivation to vote, but also that the media does inform youth about the policies that are relevant for them. These results lend support to the claim in the literature that youth are often marginalised in policy discourse and youth voter abstention could, to some extent, be a result of the reluctance of political parties to sufficiently address youth issues.Show less

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Youth Interests, Party Manifestos and the Media