I’ve found some relevant factors from yesterday’s tute on social disengagement to my blog 2 topic as Australians, especially young people are becoming politically disengaged and alienated.
Australian studies by the University of Queensland in 2003 have researched Avoidance and engagement in Australian political decision-making: The couch potato as a seething mass of impotent frustration (Louis, W.R., & Terry, D.J.) They found that students show high levels of political alienation and disengagement.
Here’s are some findings from the study:
- Most students had strong views on the war in Iraq, yet most did not express their opposition or support in a political arena.
- Australian students' activism was discriminated from inaction and from active avoidance of politics and news regarding the war.
- The discrepancies were then predicted from
(a) Unfavourable cost-benefit analyses for the individual;
(b) Perceived effectiveness of the peace movement;
(c) Predicted outcomes of the war for Australia and two national outgroups (Iraq and the United States);
(d) Distress evoked by politicians and the war, on the one hand, and protesters, on the other; and
(e) Political and national self-identification. Implications for models of attitude-behaviour inconsistency and political decision-making are discussed.
3 comments:
Thanks Fi - this is a good find and very relevant to Tutorial 6 and social psych.
I was amazed when I went to university as an undergraduate how politically apathetic it seemed. I think I'd grown up expecting something like the 1960's political activism.
Times have changed and the role of universities have changed.
In an interesting kind of way, though, students do have voices and blogging in this unit has partly for me been about helping to encourage those voices.
Hi Fiona,
You've picked a really interesting topic - it sounds really hard to me! Politics is interesting to me because I don't really know to much about it. As I have voted in the past, the sole influence on my vote is my parents. As I know little about it I asked them for information as I find little help in the media.
It's amazing the effect that our parents have on our political ideologies. I highly respect my parents and so I am greatly influenced by their views. As the article articulates, I think that young people may feel helpless with regards to politics. We may have views on particular political issues, but I know that I feel like I don't know enough to take a true stance, so I may become indifferent.
This indifference may then make us discouraged and we then rely on heuristic processing short cuts to generate a voting preference which may include our parents and even our peers views.
As James says, maybe we need to encourage those young voices to prevent this political alienation?
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