Predictors of Participatory Politics in Youth and Young Adults

Background and Purpose: As youth and young adult’s time online increases, and traditional political participation decreases among Millennials, there is increasing interest in online forms of political participation. A new form of political participation, called participatory politics, allows youth to actively engage in political discussions by contributing original content or commentary both on an offline. This emerging field is burgeoning, but still much is unknown about factors that predict participatory politics. One study found that online activity called “clicktivism” or the reflexive reaction to content, such as sharing or forwarding a story, is not predictive of future political participation for adults. A study of participatory politics using the same dataset used in this study, found that interest-driven online activities are associated with online participatory politics. The present expands this area of scholarship by comparing and contrasting factors that predict online and offline political activity among youth and young adults.

Methods: This study used data from the 2011 Youth Participatory Politics Survey (N=2880) to answer the question: how does youths’ free time, political attitudes and beliefs, and parental support for political participation relate to three different types of political participation: participatory politics online, participatory politics offline, and clicktivism (sharing or forwarding messages created by others) for youth and young adults ages 15-24. Co-variates used in this analysis include race, gender, household income, and school status (in high school, college or technical school, or not in school). Path analyses in a structural equation modeling framework were conducted in MPlus version 7.4.

Results: All three types of participatory politics (online, offline and clicktivism) were most strongly predicted by the respondents political attitudes and beliefs (𝛽=.226, p < .001, 𝛽=.198, p < .001, 𝛽=.235, p < .001 respectively). The interaction term of parental support for political participation and youths’ free time was the second strongest predictor that was positively associated with online (𝛽 =.147, p = .016) and offline (𝛽 =.186, p = .006) participatory politics, and clicktivism (𝛽 =.266, p < .001). Parental support was positively associated with both online (𝛽 =.10, p = .020) and offline (𝛽 =.129, p = .004) participatory politics, but not with clicktivism. Free time alone did not influence online or offline participatory politics.

Conclusions and Implications: This study adds to our knowledge of factors that predict online participatory political behavior. Specifically, factors that have long been recognized as predictive of political behavior offline, also seem to partially predict online participatory politics. With the increase of connective media use among youth and young adults, it is important to understand which factors predict political activity. This study also adds to our understanding of Clicktivism, specifically, that parent’s political participation does not seem to be related to this form of political participation. Other results, related to the co-variates, will also be discussed along with implications for research on participatory politics.