The Psychosocial Foundations of Abstention

Most research on abstention pays too little attention to the development of civic identities but treats each election as a stand-alone event in a citizen’s lifetime. Moreover, the significance of first-time voting is often overlooked, which is understandable given the size of this constituency but disastrous, considering the risk of producing habitual non-voters and thus permanently alienating citizens from partaking in the electoral process (van Deth 2016). The central thesis of the proposed paper is thus, that we need to understand civic subjectification in the context of adolescence, a time of multiple transitions and vulnerabilities, to understand abstention of first-time voters. Since evidence from survey and experimental research shows how anxieties – especially about the future – are detrimental for voting (e.g. Hassel & Settle 2017; Ojeda 2015), we need to better understand the exposure to insecurities and the unequally distributed abilities to cope with these insecurities, if we want to know why young people do not exercise their right to vote. In other words, we need an integrated understanding of the process of psychosocial integration as civic subjectification. Applying Latent Class Analysis (LCA) on data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England aged 13 to 20 (LSYPE 2004-10), this paper shows how different forms of insecurity solidify into “states of precarity” which significantly affect first-time voters’ likeliness to vote. Drawing theoretically on the works of Marie Jahoda and Pierre Bourdieu, the proposed conceptualisation of precarity combines psychological adversities with social inequality, describing their causes and impacts as social problems with psychological and political consequences. Anxieties and stress evoke feelings of precariousness, but in their interaction with social marginalisations (which might have triggered them in the first place), these hardships become states of precarity. While these states are often temporary, their severity and the likeliness to overcome them is conditional of social class, i.e. endowment with different capitals. Likewise, the solidification of precarity, leading to abstention, is not independent of social inequality. Through this approach, observing the whole adolescence in longitudinal perspective, we can understand how the lived experience of inequality and marginalisation feeds into young people’s development of civic identity and their likeliness to vote. As the transitions in and through different states of precarity are shaped by the young people’s class, race, and gender, this approach speaks also to debates in political sociology, e.g. Geoff Evans’ finding of abstention as the new politics of class. At the same time, the paper connects to the growing body of research into precarious working and living conditions to re-emphasise the political character (in cause and consequence) of precarity, something which Klaus Dörre in his studies on right-wing populism and extremism started to do. However, as precarity is not a fringe phenomenon anymore, neither are its repercussions – if precarity alienates voters, it lastingly obstructs representative democracies.