The study of political ambition has become the stock in trade for political scientists Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox. To their efforts exploring gender socialization, the roots of political ambition, and the decision to run for office, they have added a new volume which seeks to understand how young people today view the possibility of running for political office. Running from Office: Why Young Americans are Turned Off to Politics represents this latest work, and the conclusion is captured well in the book’s title.
Lawless and Fox draw upon a national survey of 2,163 high school students and 2,117 college students ranging in age from 13 to 25 and 115 more in-depth telephone interviews. What they find is in some ways not new: young people are turned off to politics, and the authors argue that this disconnect fuels low levels of interest to seek political office. The balance of the book attempts to link the alienation of young people to our contemporary politics of negativity, dysfunction and polarization. In successive chapters, Lawless and Fox explore the sources of these young people’s attitudes in the family, in their initial political experiences at school and with peers, and their perceptions about the honesty of political leaders. The book is highly readable and annotated with quotes from the 115 telephone interviews and sprinkled with popular culture references and quips from late night television comedians.
Lawless and Fox report that families rarely engage in political discussions and when they do the conversations are predominantly negative. Parents are a major source of encouragement for their children’s political ambitions, but there is also a statistically significant gender gap with daughters receiving less encouragement to pursue political office than sons. Those young adults reporting political ambition are also more likely to be in college than in high school, to identify as evangelical Christians than other religions, and to be non-white.
The authors also report that high school and college students spend very little time following current events and political news and thus gain little exposure to day-to-day politics. While Lawless and Fox describe the classroom experiences of most high school and college students as “apolitical,” two-thirds of their respondents report political discussions in classes a few times a month or at least once a week (pp. 76–77). Two-thirds of college students report that their classmates are interested or very interested in politics. Students rarely consume political news from the information-rich Internet and social media. Lawless and Fox assert that roughly 60% of the interviewed young adults purposefully avoid political discussions because they might cause confrontations with friends, and because such discussions appear pointless given the gridlock young adults perceive. Not surprisingly, those young adults with little political interest and information are also very unlikely to consider running for office.
Lawless and Fox devote a whole chapter to the young adults’ own attitudes toward leadership and the negative stereotypes young adults hold of politicians. Again, the data reveal a strong correlation between positive assessments of politicians and young people’s interest in running for office, but overall the young people were more likely to associate negative leadership traits with political leaders. The students aspire to be and see themselves as leaders, but not in the arena of politics. Interestingly, Lawless and Fox find a racial divide with black and Latino students being less negative of today’s politicians and more inspired by President Barack Obama than whites.
The book concludes with five suggestions to inspire young people to run for office and to put a more positive face on political involvement. Ranging from the familiar (e.g. a YouLead initiative modeled after AmeriCorps) to the novel (e.g. a politics-based video game or an app focused on political leadership opportunities), Lawless and Fox are to be applauded for offering remedies to the problem they identify.
Like many books, this one has a few flaws and gaps, some of which are frustrating and puzzling. In the frustrating category is the absence of standard methodological explanations: few details about the survey itself, an absence of explanation as to how interview subjects were chosen and how the survey respondents and interviewees compare, and ultimately no detailed demographic profile of the teens and young adults. The authors provide a single footnote that the survey was administered as an online probability-based panel through GfK Custom Research LLC (formerly Knowledge Networks), which included 3000 teens ages 13 to 17 year olds whose parents provided consent. The survey was apparently supplemented with other companion samples of respondents from an opt-in web panel, but no demographic profile of the entire panel was provided.
Also frustrating is the single causal explanation which the authors offer and the short shrift given to other scholars who have labored in this vineyard for decades. Negativity in politics is the sole culprit in this narrative, yet previous scholars have noted that the political socialization of young people is a complex process. This generation of young people grew up with the trauma of 9/11, protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, growing income inequality, and the Great Recession, but they also witnessed the transformation of American politics with the election of the first black president, a gay rights revolution, and a significant number of firsts for women in the professions and politics. Cliff Zukin and his co-authors of The New Engagement?: Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing American Citizen (2007) remind us that cohort and life cycle effects are often difficult to disentangle. While Lawless and Fox make a solid case that the toxicity of national politics and the declining trust in our political leaders are permeating the world of teenagers and college students, an argument for a single cause-effect relationship seems too neat and simple.
It is puzzling to me that the authors also ignore their own data. In Lawless’s Becoming a Candidate (2012), she notes the wide shifts in individual-level responses on nascent political ambition between two panels (2001 and 2008) of “eligible candidates,” specifically selected because of their professional successes in political pathway careers (p. 45). Even among these respondents in the candidate eligibility pool, only 25% report that they are “definitely” interested in running for office at some point in the future. Why would we expect significantly more than 11 % of teenagers and college students of all backgrounds and interests to have well-formed and definitive career horizons in the public sphere?
Finally, among the recommendations, the authors call for efforts to increase college women’s political ambition. Unfortunately, they fail to mention the highly-regarded flagship women’s leadership program, NEW Leadership™, started at Rutgers University’s Center for American Woman and Politics and now hosted on college campuses in 24 states. In a recent national alumnae survey of NEW Leadership™ graduates, significant majorities report increased desire to participate in politics and 72% report at least considering running for office. NEW Leadership™ aims to develop the skills to lead in an increasingly diverse society, and alumnae of the program agree by a large majority that their experience “increased my ability to work with people whose views differ from my own.” This is precisely the kind of result that can begin to address the negative stereotypes which many perceive in politics. In the interests of full disclosure, the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma has been a host institution since 2002.
Despite occasional shortcomings, the book documents an important consequence of our current political environment. Lawless and Fox are to be congratulated for this contribution to the literature on the political socialization of young people.
