School's Out - And We Might Not Come Back at All? The Role of Schools in Engaging Young Citizens

"We might not come back at all" - Alice Cooper's line can easily adopted to the discussion about the role of schools in engaging young citizens in elections and politics. One of the key arguments favoring a lowering of voting age to 16 is, after all, that more young people would still be in school when they become eligible for elections for the first time. Whether that is empirically true, is still largely an open question. And that is even more true when it comes to the question of whether that has the potential to increase turnout and to make it more equal. And finally, the question of mechanisms remains open as well: Is it due to curricular content? Is it due to (political) peers? In this paper, I want to address this open questions, using a highly innovative data sets of approximately 4000 young people from the most Northern German state, Schleswig-Holstein that we have interviewed three times: after a state election, after a federal election and after a local election.