Is Voting for Young People?

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Is Voting for Young People? “The central argument of this book is that over the last three decades, politics and voting have indeed become more and more the province of the elderly, which will be shown to be the case not only in the United States but also throughout the world’s advanced industrialized democracies.” In “Is Voting for Young People?” Martin Wattenberg discusses the different types of media about politics and voting that young people involve themselves in seeing, hearing, or reading. He also discusses the types of things that young people actually follow and what they do instead of being involved in voting. His final points are about the way young people view voting and their roles in recent elections. Martin Wattenberg first addresses the average age of people that read newspapers. The amount of young people reading is declining worldwide. Wattenberg continues by discussing the fact that nothing is replacing politics being in newspapers. He claims that watching a news show such as CNN would be like skimming through a newspaper, not thoroughly reading it. News does not give the research that goes into debates and arguments about things being voted on like newspapers do. There is a chart on page eleven showing the percentages of people that read a newspaper every day of the week between the years 1957 and 2004. In 1957, 76 percent of people read a newspaper every day of the week. The number decreases to 41 percent in 2004. In between these years, the numbers increase and decrease and increase, but overall it is a great decrease. In 1986 the percent of people that read a newspaper everyday was 54 percent. In 1987 the percent increased to 56 percent. That is an example of the back and forth rises and falls of the percent within the 1957 through 2004 gap. (Wattenberg, 11; 1957 News Media Study; 1958 Omnibus Survey of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior; 1967
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