Since the 2008 campaign, reporters and activists have been talking more about the unequal civic participation of young people. But this gap is no new phenomenon. Only about half of young people in the U.S. have any college experience, and their rates of voting and volunteering are around twice as high as their peers‘. Perhaps it is fair for citizens to gain more political impact if they take the trouble to vote. But it is increasingly clear that not everyone has the same access and opportunity to participate.

“It may make a difference if a couple of neighbors form a meeting and you actually had a petition or something that can make a neighborhood better but there's not any outlets like that that we hear about.“ -- young Baltimore adult, interviewed by CIRCLE

Since the 2008 election, some practitioners have been asking about how to reach the large and diverse group of youth who have not (yet) attended college. Reaching them presumably requires a different strategy than would be used for campus outreach. The NCOC Civic Health Index has helpfully shown over the past few years that online outreach may be just as valuable for youth not on a college campus, since the participation gaps are smaller online than offline. “An Inequitable Invitation to Citizenship” released by PACE (Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement) this past fall summarizes more about what we do know across many indicators of civic engagement.

This gap is a short- and long-term issue and challenge for youth, communities and democracy. CIRCLE has begun a project that involves asking young people themselves what may be going on in between the lines of survey data. We took the first step in late September and early October of 2008, when we conducted focus groups with young people in Baltimore. We then followed those focus groups with interviews of about a third of the young people in March 2009. Here are some initial findings:

• First, we heard from the youth without college experience in Baltimore that they do engage sometimes, but in ways that are not asked about in traditional surveys about civic engagement. In fact, based on the Baltimore focus groups, new questions were added to the NCOC’s Civic Health Index in 2009 about whether people give food, money or shelter. These questions ended up revealing a much smaller participation gap; and sometimes, non-college youth surpassed other groups. Additionally, in Baltimore we heard that people are talking about their community and political news a good deal. Finding these forms of engagement is crucial to reflecting on what metrics are being used to judge young people, as well as to acknowledge the perspectives and skills that young people may already possess.

• Keeping the above finding in mind, it was clear was that the youth were quite disengaged from formal political institutions. They didn’t see politics as accessible, and they saw politicians as being very different from themselves. Here’s an example:

“... And they both come from the same fire, you know, went to all the great education and both come from money for the most part. I mean Barack Obama not so much as John McCain but they're both from upper class, middle upper class families. And when you're 24-years-old and you got thousands of dollars in credit card debt and you can barely afford to pay gas and everything costs it seems like a million dollars, you know, you can't afford anything. And you have these politicians who sit up there who get flown around the country in private jets and probably waste more money in a day than we could make in day. Just drive around saying hi to people I mean when they could be actually working on issues, just because they want to get their name out there. There's no connection at all."

• We also found that distrust is deep. Their distrust covers the news media, beneficiaries of “service,” the government, and others. Their everyday interactions with local government are often alienating. Their distrust of institutions may have fed their lack of confidence in their ability to make a positive difference.

"Granted, I would like to stop violence and blah-blah-blah. I can't do that. I'm one person, what can I do?"

• The educational system does not seem to be helping much to instill civic knowledge and agency for these youth. We heard some young adults say that civic education curricula may be pushing some youth away from engagement. Specifically, some young people told stories about volunteering and service-learning and indicated the experiences were not educational, challenging or empowering. Of course, developments in schools over the past ten to fifteen years may have exacerbated this dynamic.

We’re still going through the conversations and will have additional and more-specific information in the next few months. It’s important that this subject remains a focus of research, outreach and policy, or we may look back and find that we have systematically deterred groups of Americans from voicing their opinions and participating in democracy.




Abby Kiesa is Youth Coordinator & Researcher at CIRCLE, a national research center on youth civic education and engagement. She is coordinating the qualitative component of CIRCLE's research into this civic participation gap, and is also a graduate student at the University of Maryland.