Explaining how electoral non-participation perpetuates political powerlessness raises young people’s voting intentions

Objective: Young people’s low electoral turnout in the U.K. perpetuates a vicious cycle of political underrepresentation and disengagement, undermining democratic quality and stability. We addressed a prevailing psychological motivator of youth non-voting: a perception of political powerlessness. We experimentally evaluated an empathetic refutation approach that explained how electoral non-participation perpetuates political powerlessness while affirming young people’s psychological reasons for not voting.Method: We conducted two experiments with British 18-29-year-old participants who had not voted in the 2024 UK General Election (total n = 935) to test whether reading a conversation that explained the vicious cycle of non-participation using an empathetic refutation (both experiments) or an assertive structure (Experiment 2) increased participants’ voting intentions relative to a control condition featuring an unrelated conversation.Results: Both types of explanations significantly increased participants’ voting intention compared to the control. Participants found the empathetic refutation approach to be most acknowledging of the non-voter’s perspective, but reported no significant differences in how compelling they found the explanations or their levels of trust and openness to the information presented.Conclusions: Explaining the vicious cycle of non-participation could help to improve young people’s willingness to participate in the electoral process.Keywords: democracy; voting; trust; empathy; attitude roots; affirmation; youth vote