Knowledge, autonomy and maturity: developmental and educational concerns as rhetorical resources in adolescents' discussions regarding the age of electoral majority in England

Abstract

Recent debates concerning the age of electoral majority in the UK have focused on the levels of knowledge and maturity of young people. However, little research has explored the ways in which adolescents orient to these concerns themselves. In this paper we present analyses from a qualitative interview investigation in Northern England, and explore the ways in which our adolescent participants treated voting as a responsibility which should be exercised on the basis of a rational, autonomous and informed decision. Such arguments were frequently used to argue against a reduction in the age of electoral majority. These findings are discussed in relation to policy and educational debates in the UK.Keywords: citizenship, discourse analysis, political participation, rhetoric, voting 3 Knowledge, autonomy and maturity: developmental and educational concerns as rhetorical resources in adolescents' discussions regarding the age of electoral majority in England.Political participation is a core requirement for democracy, with scholars and policy makes across 'western' liberal democracies engaged in a seemingly continual debate over how best to involve and enthuse young people in the political process. The present paper explores these issues within a UK context, with a particular focus on recent debates concerning the age of electoral majority and the introduction of citizenship education in England. A key focus of these debates has been on the educational and maturational readiness of people under the age of 18 to vote, and the paper is concerned with how adolescents themselves orient to these educational and developmental matters as they debate the possibility of lowering the age of electoral majority. people's own constructions of the objects of political and scholarly concern. It is the aim of the present study to undertake such an analysis, and it does so by adopting an approach informed by rhetorical psychology. Rhetorical PsychologyRhetorical psychology (Billig 1991, Billig et al. 1988) is a member of the wider family of discourse analytic approaches which have been developed in social psychology over the last two decades or so (e.g.

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