Seminar The Apathy Myth: Nudging Youth Back into Politics

Abstract

Youth political disengagement is widely attributed to apathy. This paper argues that this is, at least in part, a misperception. I conduct a pre-registered information provision experiment with approximately 3,000 nationally representative Italian citizens aged 18-34, exploiting the timing of the 2026 constitutional referendum on judicial reform. Respondents overestimate peer political participation by nearly 17 percentage points relative to the ISTAT benchmark. Two treatment arms - a short video citing either low or high statistics on youth engagement, each paired with an identical injunctive statement on the importance of voting - successfully shift posterior beliefs and increase stated political engagement by 0.13-0.16 standard deviations, regardless of the direction of the descriptive information. Instrumental variable estimation reveals two distinct mechanisms: the high-participation treatment operates through descriptive norm conformity, while the low-participation treatment triggers a backlash response. These findings suggest that mobilisation campaigns should anchor any descriptive message with a normative appeal.