Running from Office: Why Young Americans are Turned Off to Politics. Este artículo no está disponible.Running from Office: Why Young Americans are Turned Off to Politics

A high quality, well-functioning democracy demands that the next generation hears -- and then heeds -- a call to public service. With more than 500,000 elected positions in the United States, the political system can sustain itself and succeed only if a large number of citizens eventually put themselves forward as candidates. But Washington's dreadful performance over the past two decades has taken a toll on the young Americans who have come to know politics through this spectacle. The mean-spirited, dysfunctional political system that has come to characterize American politics turns young people off to the idea of running for office. It discourages them from aspiring, one day, to be elected leaders. It alienates them from even thinking about a career in politics.

Running from Office is the first analysis of young people's political ambition, based on a national poll of over 4,000 high school and college students. In it, Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox delve into how young people view political figures, what traits they see as necessary for political success, and how they view their own suitability to run for office. The overwhelming majority of young people have no interest whatsoever in running for office in the future. Actually, they would rather do almost anything else. And who can blame them? Most young people are not particularly tuned into politics. But when they are exposed -- at home, at school, with friends, or through the media -- they see derisive accounts of government inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and immorality. Lawless and Fox paint a political profile of the next generation that should sound alarm bells about the long-term, deeply embedded damage contemporary politics has wrought on U.S. democracy and its youngest citizens.

But the message of Running from Office is not one of all gloom and doom. The young women and men Lawless and Fox surveyed and interviewed want to effect change, and they have clear ideas for how the American political system can steer a new course. Running from Office provides suggestions for ways to generate heightened levels of political ambition among today's young people, including better governance, civic education, voluntary community and national service programs, and political and media campaigns geared to mobilize young people.

Jennifer L. Lawless is a Professor of Government and the Director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University. She is the author of Becoming a Candidate: Political Ambition and the Decision to Run for Office and the co-author (with Richard L. Fox) of two books: It Takes a Candidate and It Still Takes a Candidate. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and has appeared in numerous academic journals. She has also issued several policy reports on the barriers that impede women's candidate emergence.

Richard L. Fox teaches and researches in the areas of U.S. Congress, elections, media and politics and gender politics. His most recent work is an edited volume with Jennifer Ramos entitled iPolitics: Citizens, Elections, and Governing in the New Media Era. His work has appeared in such journals as Political Psychology, The Journal of Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Social Problems, PS, and Politics and Gender. He has also written op-ed articles for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.