The age of the disengaged: are Millennials really more alienated from politics than youth in generations past?

• Author: Cooper, Ryan

Running from Office : Why Young Americans Are Turned Off to Politics

by Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox

Oxford University Press, 232 pp.

If there's one thing that left, right, and center can agree on these days, it's that the federal government is not functioning well. Congress, the first branch of government mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, has roughly the approval rating of anthrax. Public opinion of the Supreme Court, according to the Pew Research Center, is at 50 percent--the lowest in thirty years of polling. Our twice-elected president isn't even hitting the 50 percent approval mark.

The implications of all this for the next generation of would-be politicos is the subject of Running from Office: Why Young Americans Are Turned Off to Politics, a new book by the political scientists Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox. The basic question is simple: How are we to run a democracy if no one will run for office?

Lawless and Fox, who have previously written about the gender gap in politics, conducted hundreds of interviews on this question, and largely confirm the conventional wisdom: young people are generally turned off to politics, which they perceive as a corrupt cesspool of incompetence and pointless flailing. Since the mid-1990s, a paltry 20 percent of under-thirty voters have voted in midterm elections. Had they gone to the polls in 2014, things might have turned out very differently. The authors do not, however, come close to establishing their major premise--that young people are more alienated than youth in generations past. Cranky graybeards have been griping about young people since time immemorial, so a book premised on today's youth being unusually disconnected faces a high burden of proof.

Voting behavior is arguably the most reliable indicator of democratic engagement. While turnout among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in midterm elections has fallen somewhat--from more than 30 percent in 1966 to around 20 percent today--presidential elections show a much less clear trend. Youth turnout was more than 50 percent in 1964, and has not been equaled since. But about 40 percent of the under-thirty crowd reliably shows up for presidential elections. In 2008, youth turnout was the highest since 1972. Moreover, the voting behavior of youth tends to track that of the population at large. Youth turnout is off somewhat from previous highs, but so is turnout generally.

Are fewer young people running for office than...