Who Substitutes Service for Politics? Assessing the Roles of Youth and Partisan Alienation in Americans’ Forms of Civic Engagement

Political scientists have long expressed concern about citizens who focus their civic activity on community service, seemingly treating it as a substitute for political involvement. Proposed explanations for this phenomenon portray it as popular among young adults. They also speculate that a politics dominated by two ideologically polarized, uncivil, and chronically gridlocked parties may cause citizens who do not feel they have or want a place on those partisan teams to avoid the arenas in which they fight. Few large and representative studies, however, examine how citizens allocate their civic activity between service and political action. Using the 2016 American National Election Study, I find that signs of alienation from the country’s major political parties increase the likelihood that citizens limit their activity to service, making a substitution scenario plausible. More commonly, however, rising partisan alienation predicts a shift in political involvement from electoral to non-electoral forms. Younger citizens are surprisingly less likely than their elders to specialize in service.