Hashtags, Hymnals, and Homeless Shelters: Untangling Young Adults’ Engagement in 2024

• In Event: 40251 - Political Engagement

Abstract

Young adults didn’t behave the way pollsters expected in the 2024 general election. The Harvard Youth Poll projected a commanding 28-point lead for Harris among 18 to 29 year olds, yet AP-NORC found that Harris edged out Trump by just 4 points. This unexpected outcome sent academics and pundits scrambling, raising fundamental questions about what we actually know about young adults - how they engage politically, why they mobilize, and what factors shape their participation. This paper takes up these questions by examining the civic, political, and religious engagement of young adults in the U.S.; we argue that a key problem with the extant literature is the tendency of social scientists to analyze different kinds of engagement in isolation. This paper uses a multimethod approach - survey data and interviews with a subset of survey respondents - to explore whether theoretically relevant variables that have helped social scientists explain individual engagement in the past, including education, political ideology, experiences with engagement, internal motivation, and emotion, continue to shed light on the engagement of young adults today. We conducted hierarchical regression analysis to evaluate the effects of controlling for other forms of collective engagement on factors associated with political, religious, and civic engagement. The quantitative analysis supports the argument that the engagement of young adults does not unfold in simple, preordained patterns. Instead, engagement begets engagement. We find that when we controlled for other forms of participation in our regression analyses, the predictors we usually rely on such as education, race, and emotions like anxiety often lost predictive power. We explore how the factors associated with political engagement are intertwined with civic and religious engagement.

Authors

• Kyle Rose, Florida State University

• Deana Rohlinger, Florida State University

• Levi Mitzen, Florida State University

• Yuki Proulx Maynor, Florida State University