A look at the effects of reducing voting age and efforts to increase participation of youth in politics.
This chapter focuses upon key questions around efforts to include young people in the political process in Scotland.
The two areas we choose to focus on are the commitment and subsequent efforts made by the Scottish Parliament to encourage and accommodate young people’s participation in its work.
The second is the more recent decision to reduce the voting age in Scottish Parliament and local council elections to sixteen in 2015 (although the first manifestation of Votes at 16 was in fact the 2014 independence referendum). Both of these developments have, in theory, challenged prevailing notions of young people’s place in politics. We deal with each in turn, providing an overview of the Scottish experience, the impact of the initiatives in question, and the implications this has for questions around young people’s political involvement in a broader international context.