Young People, Media Use, and Voter Turnout: An Analysis of the 2000 National Election Study.

Young Americans' non-engagement in politics has been raised as a critical issue for the last 10 years. People claim that young people today are more ignorant, apathetic, and cynical about politics than at any other time in the past. A recent report from the Washington Post quoted a young voter from Arkansas as saying, "The young people don't feel connected to the candidates, because they don't campaign to them. And the candidates don't feel connected to the young people, because they think they don't vote." Using the National Election Study (NES) data, this study seeks to discover the relationships between various factors that influence voting behavior and voter turnout among young people aged 18 to 35 in the 2000 presidential election. Using the hierarchical regression, this study tried to predict how much of variance in voter turnout among young Americans was explained by certain factors. This study further develops a profile of the young people who are likely to turn out to vote on an election day using the discriminant analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]