When Skipping School is a Good Deed
What happens when politicians get Greta-Thunberg’d into paying attention to young voices? They start listening, it appears, to judge from the way a good many of them are trying to out-green each other of late. Wait, does that mean that they can actually be swayed by people who can’t even vote yet? Sounds outlandish.
So maybe the real question should be: What happens to the parents of these young people who take to the streets to voice their concerns about climate change? New research by a group of scholars at the ifo Institute and colleagues from the Technical University Braunschweig and the University of York decided to investigate what effects youth protest movements have on the political arena, and how these effects come about.
To do this, they focused on Germany and, specifically, on the Fridays for Future movement (FFF), inspired by, well, yes, Greta Thunberg. Over the course of 2019, large crowds of school kids made the big sacrifice of skipping school to demonstrate for rapid and far-reaching measures to mitigate climate change, in what has been labelled as some of the largest environmental protests in history. They aimed not only at shaming politicians into action, but also businesses and all adults as well. It seems to have worked.
Politicians have long dragged their feet on tackling climate change because of an old political conundrum: how to impose measures that entail immediate costs for today’s voters for the sake of benefiting voters of a distant future, without committing political suicide in the current electoral cycle.
The problem (for the politicians) is that those future voters are already here, in the form of not-yet-voting young citizens, who just happen to be the ones who will bear the brunt of the projected impact of climate change. And while these youngsters can’t vote yet, they do have a voice. A loud voice. So not only politicians, but businesses are also paying heed.
The mechanics of how this came about is threefold. According to the researchers’ findings, after hand-sifting through records of some 4,000 protests and cell-phone movements and subjecting their data to stringent tests, the three key effects were how the parents of these young citizens responded (they greened up); how politicians positioned themselves after large protests (ditto); and how the media increased the intensity of their environmental reporting.
The main beneficiary has been Germany’s Green Party. The juicy bit: the heightened support for the Green Party stems entirely from voters with children of FFF-relevant ages. As it turned out, the Greens shot up in elections to the point that, for the first time, they sniffed a chance at bagging the chancellorship in the last general election. While that didn’t pan out, the Greens gathered enough votes to be part of the governing coalition at the national level, holding now several key ministries, as well as of governing coalitions in 10 of Germany’s 16 federal states.
Not bad. Not bad at all, for the non-voting crowd. Not only did they get away with skipping school on a regular basis, but managed to convince their parents that they were doing exactly the right thing. For teenagerdom, that must be a historical first.
And it may be even a boon for the climate.
The Power of Youth: Did the "Fridays for Future" Climate Movement Trickle-Up to Influence, Voters, Politicians, and the Media?
CESifo, Munich, 2022
CESifo Working Paper No. 9742