A CALL has been made for 16-year-olds to be allowed to go to the polls in all UK elections after a study found they are more likely to continue the habit of voting.
Scotland lowered its voting age to 16 ahead of the independence referendum in 2014 and this has been in place for all Scottish elections since 2015.
Now the first evaluation of the longer-term outcomes of the policy has found the trend of young people of this age group turning out to vote in greater numbers than their peers continues even as they grow up.
The report, carried out by researchers at Edinburgh and Sheffield universities, has recommended advocating for a lowering of the voting age to 16 for all UK elections to “give more young people the opportunity to benefit”.
Study co-author Christine Huebner, lecturer in quantitative social sciences at the University of Sheffield, said that when the voting age was lowered in 2014-15, there was a big turnout among 16-17 year olds compared to young people aged 18-24.
However it was unknown if this was a one-off because of the impact of the independence referendum. The research looked at whether this pattern had continued in this group now aged between 22-24 years old.
“We checked whether they were still more likely to turn out to vote than their slightly older peers in the 2021 Scottish Parliament election,” Heubner said.
“That was indeed the case, and not only for these young people, but for all young people in the meantime, who have had the chance to vote at 16, 17.
“On average, these cohorts of young people are more likely to turn out to vote than young people in Scotland who have been enfranchised at 18.”
However the study also found that a reduction in voting inequality which came from enfranchising people at a younger age does not seem to last.
Huebner said: “That was a really surprising finding – so in 2015, we saw that for 16 and 17 year olds we do not see the normal kind of pattern of inequality.
“In 2015, 16 and 17 year olds indicated they were as likely to vote regardless of what kind of social background they were from.”
She said that social class did not have an impact when it came to 16 and 17 year olds voting in the 2021 Holyrood election.
But she added: “However, for the young people that have now grown older – regardless of whether they were enfranchised at 16 or 18 in Scotland – they all went back to sort of that standard pattern that we always see across the population, where people from more well off or advantaged backgrounds are much more likely to turn out to vote.”
Alice Mazon, spokesperson for the British Youth Council’s Votes at 16 Youth Action Group, said lowering the voting age “forces politicians to pay attention to youth issues”.
She added: “The data from Scotland underpins the case for Votes at 16, clearly demonstrating that lowering the voting age empowers young people to recognise – and sustain – their political influence.
“This is particularly important at a time when it feels like young people’s views are misrepresented or not taken seriously and we are challenged by ever increasing voter disengagement.”
