Political apathy has led to increased concerns regarding representative democracies because election results do not encompass the entire population who are eligible to vote.
According to a study by CIRCLE director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, nearly 20% of American youth do not feel they know enough to vote.
Notably, the study found that many young people have glaring misconceptions about the voting process; for instance, several individuals in the study believed having relatively minor offenses on their criminal record, such as driving under the influence, restricted their ability to vote.
In political science voter fatigue is defined as, "the apathy that the electorate can experience under certain circumstances, one of which could be that they are required to vote too often."
[18] A large amount of exposure to political messages year-round can cause fatigue that turns potential voters away from the voting process.
[32] The Centre for Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy (CIRCLE) breaks down youths into different groups, Broadly Engaged (19%), Political Specialists (19%) and Only Voted (18%), with the rest clustered into Civically Alienated (16%), Politically Marginalized (14%) and Engaged Non-Voters (14%).
[38] Political apathy is speculated because individuals within the European Parliament often perceive such elections to hold low salience context.
Hence, political apathy is a phenomenon that heavily impacts the turnout of European Parliament elections.
[39] Speculated reasons for this increase are pertaining to Brexit, the Migrant Crisis, climate change policy, and rising concern over anti-EU sentiment.
[40] In the United Kingdom, like many other western liberal democracies, there has been a steady decline in turnout in general elections over recent decades.
[42] In addition to declining turnout over recent decades trust in the government has fallen also leading to disengagement.
According to the Pew Research Center, only 55.7 percent of the U.S. voting age population cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election.
The United States Election Project had similar findings, estimating apathy slightly higher: 46.9 percent of eligible voters did not vote in 2016.
The lack of automatic registration contributes to the issue that there are over a third of eligible citizen in the United States that are not registered to vote.
Since 1976, voter turnout has stayed between an 8.5 percent range of fluctuation and has been on a historical downward trend, although there are differences among certain racial, ethnic, and age groups.
People in younger age demographics are speculated to be more focused on other aspects in their life, such as college, marriage, and careers.
One reason for low turnout rates during primaries is due to the apathy regarding who will make it to the general election.
This leads candidates chosen out of increasingly polarized voter pools, which heighten rigidness and gridlock in the government.
Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton made appeals to the working class in Midwestern states by pointing out that they feel as if their votes carried little weight and said communities had been abandoned by past candidates.
Trump and Clinton did the same with Black and Latino voters in urban areas, voicing concerns with political alienation in the past.
[51] In a Google study on "Interested Bystanders," experts discovered that 48.9% of people in America are paying attention to the political world but not voicing any opinion on the matter (non-voting, non-volunteering for campaigns etc.
A 2018 survey by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found only one third of Americans could pass a general citizenship test, just 13% of young Americans knew when the Constitution of the United States was ratified, and less than 50% of respondents could accurately identify the member countries of the Axis powers of World War II.
According to the Tuft study, this has led 20% of young adults to avoid voting due to not knowing enough information to cast a ballot.
[60] Civic technology seeks to counteract the effects of political apathy through more modern means, such as social media, applications, and websites.
[62][additional citation(s) needed] For the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook implemented reminders to register to vote in its social network.