Young Citizens and Changing Electoral Turnout, 1964–2001

Traditional academic understandings of youth abstention have tended to argue that young people suffer from life-cycle related 'start-up' problems in relation to politics and are more likely to abstain from participation in the political and electoral process than their older counter-parts. However, patterns of electoral turnout in the last ten years point to the possibility that recent cohorts of young people are politically distinct from previous generations.