Exploring Youth Candidates’ Motivational Profiles

• In Event: Poster Session: Elections and Voting Behavior

Abstract

The 2018 mid-term elections in the United States gave rise to a new wave of candidates, running for office for the first time. Many of these candidates came from groups traditionally underrepresented in U.S. politics, especially women, people of color, and young people (Kamarck, 2018; Lai, Lu, Lerer, & Griggs, 2018; E. Schneider, 2018). In an effort to better understand who these candidates were and where they came from, this paper examines the motivational profiles of a small sample of candidates, all under 35 and running for the first time.
This is an exploratory study that aims to unpack the motivations of young seekers of political office and both how that motivational profile has been shaped by prior experiences, as well as how it influences their experience of candidacy. Political candidacy is often overlooked in the youth civic engagement and political socialization literature because such a small number of individuals choose to run for office. This study analyses interview data from a group of young candidates who ran for political office for the first time in 2018, in order to better understand the motivators for why they chose to seek office and the role that political ambition and motivation has played in their civic development to this point and in their campaigns.
Moncrief, Squire, and Jewell (2001) identify three primary profiles for how candidates make the decision to run – self-starters, encouraged, and persuaded. Self-starters are those who say it was entirely their own idea to run, or who have always planned to run for office. Encouraged candidates are those who had thought of running for office, but did not make the decision to do so until they were encouraged by others. Finally, persuaded candidates are those who had never considered running for office until someone else from their community suggested it. One respondent fit this description. Results suggest that these profiles influenced how respondents spoke about their campaigns, as well as the role that civic education and childhood experiences played in their political careers. These profiles also impacted their perceived costs & benefits associated with running for office, and how they came to describe their own personal ambitions and influences.
Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of youth civic engagement at the highest levels, and provides preliminary evidence on how a new generation of candidates makes the decision to run, and how they fair once they do. As political groups in the United States seek to diversity the pool of candidates for public office, this paper provides insight into what motivates a non-traditional set of candidates. Additionally, this paper contributes to our understanding of the early political socialization of first-time legislative candidates by exploring the role of civic education experiences in shaping the decision to run and the campaign for elected office. While most civic education initiatives are not explicitly focused on preparing young people for eventual political candidacy, it is important to understand how these experiences shape the long-term civic trajectories of youth.

Author

• Kelly Siegel-Stechler, Johns Hopkins University