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Youth Involvement in Political Parties
By Dr. Lisa Young and
Dr. William Cross
Previous research has revealed that in Canada, among youth, we have low rates of voting, low rates of interest in Canadian politics, and even a diminished sense of attachment to the country. In light of this research, it should come as no surprise whatsoever to discover that young Canadians’ membership in political parties is also in decline.
This phenomenon first came to our attention in 2000, when we undertook a survey of members of the five major political parties at the federal level. In this survey, we found that the average age of a party member responding to our survey was 59. Only three percent of respondents to our survey were under the age of 25, although they comprised 11% of the Canadian population that year.
There is evidence that that even in the space of a generation or less, the patterns of youth involvement in political parties in Canada have declined quite remarkably. A survey from 1990 told us that about 10% of people aged 18 to 25 reported that they had ever been members of a political party. Ten years later, that number declined to five percent. This rapid downward movement suggests a trend toward what could be called “parties without members.”
The data from our 2000 survey suggest that youth recruitment is quite important to the long-term involvement of citizens in political parties. Among card-carrying Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats, aged over 45, 20% as youths. Among people a little bit younger, a third first joined when they were 25. In other words, the parties’ long-term strategy of trying to recruit young people as party members on the theory that they would remain active in the party seems to us to have been fairly grounded in reality. This, in fact, was an important source of recruitment. This means that the inability of parties to recruit significant numbers of young people now suggests a long-term trend toward parties with fewer members and fewer active members.
Not just a Canadian phenomenon
This is not uniquely a Canadian phenomenon. In fact, in most liberal industrialised democracies, the same trends are apparent. The consensus among political scientists who study political parties, is that these are organizations in decline, at least as internally democratic membership organizations.
Many of the accounts of declining membership in political parties point to the processes of modernization as the cause. First, increasing rates of post-secondary education, which one might think would produce more members for elite organizations like political parties have, in fact, the opposite effect. Well-educated citizens are apparently unwilling to be involved in such organizations as their participation has little immediate effect and consequently seems meaningless. Second, changing social values, particularly increasing egalitarianism and a “decline of deference,” compound this tendency. Third, changes in social organization, including lower rates of unionization and atomization of other collective enterprises, make it more difficult for parties to recruit members. Fourth, the mass media have replaced political parties as a means of conveying information to the public. As a consequence, parties are held in lower regard and party members are less necessary as a means of ‘getting the word out’ for parties. Fifth, a trend toward professionalization of politics has substantially reduced political parties’ need for members and their volunteer labour. Many of the functions that party members performed in the past can now be undertaken more efficiently and scientifically by pollsters, advertising executives and the like.
It is in this context that we launched our study of declining youth involvement in Canadian political parties. One important element of this is an effort to explain the decline. We have in mind several potential explanations.
Civic engagement
The first has to do with civic engagement. If we assume that community involvement in a formal way predicts membership in a political party or other traditional political organization, then to the extent that civic engagement is in decline, we might expect to see a party membership in decline.
The second explanation relates to values and social structures. Value changes such as those alluded to earlier may well make the hierarchical organization of political parties particularly unappealing to young people.
Thirdly, we suspect that structural changes may account for the decline. Changing economic organization, higher tuition fees and similar factors may simply render young people less available for activities like party membership as they juggle education and paid work.
Our fourth explanation has to do with the character of party organization itself. To the extent that political parties have professionalized and rely on state funding to sustain their operations, they may simply be less concerned with the need to recruit party members for either the present or the future.
The research is still in its preliminary stages. To date, we have undertaken a survey of youth members of the Liberal party, the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois. Plans to survey the two parties on the right of the spectrum were shelved because of the two parties’ merger, but may be revisited. As the research project progresses, we will gather data about young Canadians who do not belong to political parties, allowing us to draw contrasts between the two groups in order to shed some light on the validity of our potential explanations.
The survey of youth members of the three parties was restricted to party members aged 18 to 25 and was conducted in fall of 2003. It was a mail-back survey with a response of 33%, which, considering that many of these young people are university students, that they move frequently, and are often busy with part-time work is a reasonable response rate.
Joining the party
Almost 60 percent of our survey respondents told us they were asked to join their party; they did not join on their own initiative. This stands in sharp contrast to our survey of all party members, the vast majority of whom joined on their own initiative. For young people, then, recruitment into the party seems particularly important.
Who asked them to join? About 20 percent told us that a friend or neighbour had recruited them, and another 10 percent said that a fellow student asked them to join. But for almost half our respondents, the invitation to join the party came from a family member. Taken together with some of our other findings, this suggests that party membership in Canada is, at least for young people, very much a family affair.
Did a specific event trigger their membership? Over one-third of respondents told us that a leadership contest served as impetus for them to join their party. This ranges from a low of 19 percent of Bloc members, to 34 percent of Liberals and 53 percent of New Democrats. It is not coincidence that both the NDP and the Liberals had leadership contests the year prior to our survey. Our findings lend particular credence to the idea that Jack Layton’s leadership contest was particularly important to recruiting young people into the NDP. For members of the Bloc, the event that was most likely to trigger their decision to join was a policy issue, and that issue was Quebec sovereignty.
Motivations
Examining other motivations to join a party, we find that relatively few young party members were concerned about helping their career or getting a government job. The exception to this is in the Liberal party, where almost a quarter indicated that helping their career was a ‘very important’ motivation for joining the party. This is not particularly surprising given that the Liberal party has governed federally for over a decade. That said, young New Democrats in Saskatchewan, where their party governs provincially, were no more likely to be motivated by careerism than their counterparts elsewhere in the country. The opportunity to socialize was salient for one in five young party members, and again was more important to young Liberals. The two factors that were the most widely cited, however, were a belief in the party’s policy and a desire to make a difference. A majority of young party members across parties cited these reasons as very important.
Finally, we had some interesting results to our questions about young party members’ political socialization. We asked them a series of questions about whether they had taken a post-secondary Canadian government course, a secondary civics course, and about their family’s political involvement. Our findings suggest that socialization plays a key role in distinguishing young party members from non-members.
Of our respondents, almost half had taken a post-secondary Canadian government course; over half had taken a secondary school civics class. More than sixty percent told us that at least one of their parents belonged to a political party; almost three quarters indicated that their family talked politics frequently and that their household had a daily newspaper delivered when they were growing up. On all of these measures, the young party members are quite distinct from the Canadian population as a whole. This suggests that socialization is a strong predictor of party membership, a key traditional form of political activity.
These conclusions will be tested more rigorously in the next phase of research. For comparative purposes, we plan to undertake a survey of university students early in 2005. We have decided to study university students, as opposed to young people in the population at large, because we find that the vast majority of young party members are university students. Students are therefore a closer comparator and there are reasons of convenience for studying university students as distinct from young people in the population at large. We are going to follow this up through interviews and focus groups, both with young party members and with some of the same kinds of people on which CRIC’s research is focusing – young people who are active in the community, who are involved in anti-globalization movements, and other civil society organizations, but not political parties. These are the people who, a generation ago, we would have expected to also belong to a political party; so we want to find out what their perceptions of parties are and how these might be turning them off of party membership.
Dr. Lisa Young is Associate Professor of Political Science and a Professor of the Institute for Advanced Policy esearch at the University of Calgary. Her recent publications include Advocacy Groups with Joanna Everitt, Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics, with R.K. Carty and W. Cross, Feminists and Party Politics and articles in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Party Politics, Political Research Quarterly and the Journal of Canadian Studies. Dr. Young’s research projects include a study of the impact of new campaign finance regulations on political party organization in Canada, and a study of youth involvement in Canadian political parties.
Dr. William Cross holds the Edgar and Dorothy Davidson Chair in Canadian Studies in the Department of Political Science at Mount Allison University. Dr. Cross is Director of the Canadian Democratic Audit. His recent publications include Political Parties; Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics with . Kenneth Carty and Lisa Young; Political Parties, Representation and Electoral Democracy in Canada; and journal articles in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Party Politics, Political Research Quarterly and the Journal of Canadian Studies. His current research projects include an examination of young Canadians' participation in political parties.
 hmmmmmmm......
Without picking apart who/what and where of this study - the general ideas are quite true in this country....
Too many people (youth) feel unimportant/unnecessary to the political process in this country......we have taken control of many elements in our (popular) culture - we should also be doing the same of our political culture..........
I was involved in a Youth based branch of a national political party and found it very rewarding on so many levels.....there are so many aspects to this political machine that drives our democracy - that you cannot learn from the news or even some textbooks.....make your voice heard and contribute to the continued political climate of free speech and democractic ideals that we are so lucky to have in Canada.....
We - don't listen to/want 59 year olds rapping on the radio - why should we be listening to them "rapping" on in Queen's Park/Ottawa - the time for change as always is now........
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 IF YOU GOT TRANCE IN YOUR PANTS WHIP IT OUT!!! IF NOT JUST WHIP IT OUT ANYWAY!!!
   
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Nathan Fake - Outhouse (Valentino Kanzyani Remix) 
