Impact On Youth Democracies

A substantial quantity of scholarly work has been focused on the maintenance and advancement of democratic states, especially young and newly established democracies, where the topics of the academia concerning the maintenance of democracies range from development to security. It is in this pursuit of betterment that scholars have delved deep into the details and complexities that when are compounded comprise democracies. It is perhaps due to this preoccupation with the idiosyncratic that brought about an oversight of the more fundamental facets of democracies and their innate importance, however, this is not to state that the rudimentary aspects of democracies have been neglected by academia, but simply that great attention has been progressively …show more content…
Many youth who have a less advantageous socioeconomic status can face many conventional obstacles that can prevent or dissuade youth from voting. Situations where in one cannot take off of world (or more plausibly not afford to), when one cannot spare the cost of gas to get to a polling location, when a young single mother cannot find time between raising her child and work to go vote are all aggregate elements that can lead to an individual not being able to vote (Plutzer, Wiefek 2006; Charles, Stephens 2013). With income inequality in many states expanding these issues are becoming progressively more pronounced and lead to policies that contribute to even more economic hindrances, like policies that lead to gentrification or the process of renewal and rebuilding real estate in deteriorated urban neighborhoods by upper income families or individuals, thus improving property values but often displacing low-income families and small businesses (Galbraith, Hale 2008; Knotts, Haspel 2006). While the scholarly work that explores economic causalities brings forward great insights behind declining youth voter turnout, they often find difficulty in prescribing action to rectify the …show more content…
Even in the case of the United States it should not be assumed that the sole promotion of education will be enough to curb the decline of youth voter turnout. Helliwell and Putnam (2007) point toward the distinction made by Nie, Junn, and Stehlik-Barry (1996), where they define the difference between relative and absolute effects of education, and assert that education has both internal and external elements, thus an individual’s behavior is not only effected by their own education, but also those that they surround themselves with. It was found that participation is affected primarily by relative educational levels, and thus has not been (and should not have been expected to be) rising with aggregate educational levels (Helliwell and Putnam 2007). As such, this explains why US’s youth voter turnout like many other states around the world is continually declining, despite the US having a statistically outlying correlation between education and voter