We are pleased to announce that our research article ‘The lessons 0f 1969: policy learning, policy memory and voting age reform’ has been published in the academic Journal British Politics.
In the article based on our Leverhulme Trust funded research into the process and impact of the 1969 Representation of the People Act, which resulted in the UK becoming the first democratic country to lower the voting age t0 16, Andy Mycock, Tom Loughran and Jon Tonge use the literature on policy learning and policy memory to analyse the impact of the 1969 act and its relevance to the contemporary voting age debate. We argue that;
-Despite the intensification of the debate around Votes-at-16 in the UK in recent years there appears a lack of interest from advocates and opponents in exploring the process and impact of the 1969 act and linking this to contemporary concerns.
-Important lessons can be drawn from analysing the 1969 act and its subsquent impact on young people’s political engagement particularly in relation to the need to take a holistic approach to the issue.
-That a lack of memory of past policy interventions on the voting age can be a product of institutional amenesia combined with interntional and unintential forms of policy myopia and that it is important that this is overcome for the (actual and possibly future) implementation of Votes-at-16.
