Britons’ “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union provides the intellectual equivalent of a cold shower, offering a sobering reminder that, far more often, most young people are deeply disengaged — even when an issue could affect their demographic slice most.
Just before the referendum, Holly Ellyatt of CNBC asked: “Young voters might hold key to Brexit vote—but will they use it?”
Today, Britain’s Daily Telegraph sifted voting data and concluded: “The grays have it:”
As more polling is done, there’ll be more detail, but it’s pretty clear that young people played to type. This was seen as a critical question in recent months, as summarized by my colleague Alison Smale in May:
Pundits say the youth vote will be crucial in determining British membership; if the 18-to-30 crowd actually votes, the theory goes, the campaign to “Remain” in Europe will win. “Leave” supporters tend to be older and more fixed in their ways and are thought to be more likely to actually cast a ballot.
With issues like climate change, the same tendency seems to hold. The buildup of long-lived carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, likely peaking in the next few decades, will be affecting climate and coastlines for many centuries to come. There’s lots of activism, from the divestment push to lawsuits in which children and young adults are the plaintiffs. As far back as 2005, I wrote about young people pressing climate treaty negotiators for not taking into account the concerns of younger generations.
I’m looking for more recent data, but in 2010 researchers at Yale and George Mason University came to this conclusion after a climate survey:
[T]he conventional wisdom holds that young Americans, growing up in a world of ever more certain scientific evidence, increasing news attention, alarming entertainment portrayals, and school-based curricula, should be more engaged with and concerned about the issue of climate change than older Americans.
However, contrary to this conventional wisdom, new nationally representative survey data analyzed by American University communication researchers and collected by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication reveal that Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are, for the most part, split on the issue of global warming and, on some indicators, relatively disengaged when compared to older generations.
Will this change? Ask someone under 20. If you are under 20, let me know what you think.
Twitter postscripts | A sift for “young old Brexit” on Twitter provides more views on the demographic divide in Britain.
This Twitter post from Lord Ashcroft, a Conservative Party figure who was for exiting* the E.U., captures the breakdown:
Lord Ashcroft was for leaving the European Union, not remaining bound, as was originally written. At the link in the post, he explained his position this way: "The question is not whether the world’s fifth largest economy could prosper outside the E.U. – of course it could – but whether we should tie ourselves to a union whose ambitions are so very different from our own. Maybe our future governments will be able to protect Britain from the worst of them. But why take the risk?