Elections Go! Delivering Youth Political Participation

Turnout at elections in advanced industrial democracies has been in decline for some decades. This problem is particularly acute at European Parliament elections. Not only is electoral participation declining, it is systematically skewed in favour of older, better-educated, healthier and more affluent citizens (Wass and Blais, 2017). Strategies to promote greater political engagement among young people must make it easier for these voters to access the polls but much more crucially, must engage young citizens with the political decision-making process and enhance the perceived link between its outcomes and citizen realities. Elections Go! is a digital political participation platform with voter facilitation and mobilisation tools which is being designed as part of a European Commission funded action research project. This paper will document the use of Bootcamp bootleg as the underpinning methodology for ethnographic research in schools in Finland and the UK. The approach was used to explore and uncover the latent political participation interests and needs of 16-18 year olds and the paper will present evidence on political interest, engagement, media use and key influencers for this demographic before going on to explain how the method delivered the final design decisions on the features and modalities of Elections Go! The research outlined in this paper has been conducted as part of a project that has received funding from the European Commission Diretorate-General Justice and Consumers under the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (2014-2020). Grant number: 769067