A secret no more: Canada's 1st codebreaking unit comes out of the shadows

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Examination Unit's covert nature kept it out of spotlight for decades

Joseph Tunney · CBC News · Posted: Aug 07, 2022 

Sylvia Gellman, 101, stands next to a plaque commemorating the Examination Unit, the codebreaking bureau where she worked during the Second World War. Her hand is held by Julie McInnes, whose mother, Rita Bogue, also had a job there. (Joseph Tunney/CBC)

For years, Sylvia Gellman's loved ones were left in the dark about what she did for a living in the early 1940s. 

But in a mansion that once sat along Laurier Avenue East, Gellman and her colleagues — many of whom were women — worked to assist a top secret mission: cracking codes and ciphers used in secret and diplomatic communications during the Second World War.   

"No one outside knew what we were doing," the 101-year-old told CBC Ottawa on Saturday.

"You were so aware of it being a secret mission. And you didn't tell anybody. And I followed that very closely. I didn't even tell my family."

On Saturday morning, a plaque honouring the Examination Unit, Canada's first cryptographic bureau, was unveiled at the Laurier House National Historic Site, next door to where Gellman once worked.

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The house was also the residence of William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada's prime minister during the Second World War.

Gellman said while her loved ones knew she had a top-secret job, they hardly understood the breadth of her work. Those duties included typing out decoded Japanese messages before they were rushed to what was then called the Department of External Affairs. 

Intelligence was also shared with the British government's Bletchley Park, a centre of Allied code-breaking where names like Alan Turing walked the halls. 

Sylvia Gellman said while her family knew she had an important job during the Second World War, she kept its precise nature a closely guarded secret. (Joseph Tunney/CBC)

Having the unit's contributions to Canada officially marked with a plaque was something of a pandemic project for Diana Pepall, who's researched the bureau since 2014. 

It's no surprise that so few people know about the efforts of Gellman and her coworkers, Pepall said. 

"When they left, they all got a memo saying, 'Just because war is over and you're no longer working here, you're not allowed to talk about this for the rest of your life.'" she said. "I've seen the actual memo." 

One woman Pepall found during her research said that two years of her mother's life had always been unaccounted for — until they were filled in by the researcher's efforts.

"The mother was right there, and then gave a 20-minute speech that nobody had ever heard before on her work at the Examination Unit," Pepall said. 

Researcher Diana Pepall said the Examination Unit helped the nation become more independent of Britain. She's been looking into the bureau since 2014. (Joseph Tunney/CBC )

Helped strengthen Canada's independence

The unit's success also marked an important milestone in Canada's independence within the intelligence community.

In some ways, the Examination Unit grew into the Communications Security Establishment (CSE): the national cryptologic agency that provides the federal government with information technology security and foreign signals intelligence. Many employees went from one secretive organization to another, said Erik Waddell, who also works for CSE.

"The codebreaking work they did during the war proved, not only to our allies, but to Canadian government officials and ministers and the prime minister, that there was in fact a value in Canada having its own independent intelligence gathering ability," he said. 

"[It also proved] that it was worth preserving that capacity after the war."

The work of Gellman and others, Waddell said, also "helped build, foster and maintain" partnerships with its allies, something that's been crucial to the establishment of Five Eyes, a key intelligence-sharing alliance on today's world stage.

For Gellman, the Examination Unit was more than just her place of work: it was a second home where she met two lifelong friends. 

Having lost a brother in the war, Gellman said she understood her job's importance and was proud to work at the cryptographic bureau.

"I felt the whole thing was amazing, what was going on," she said. "I really did."

Bill with incentives for 'North American' electric vehicles passes in U.S. Senate

Canada had feared earlier proposal limiting tax credits to American-made vehicles

The Canadian Press · Posted: Aug 07, 2022

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a visit to the General Motors Factory ZERO electric vehicle assembly plant in Detroit on Nov. 17, 2021. A previous version of the bill that passed the U.S. Senate on Sunday had proposed incentives for vehicles built only in the United States, rather than all of North America. (Evan Vucci/The Associated Press)


The new plan to encourage Americans to buy more electric vehicles built in North America, instead of just the United States, has cleared its tallest hurdle.

After a marathon voting session that lasted nearly 24 hours, the U.S. Senate finally approved the new Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris had to break a 50-50 tie to pass the legislation, a dramatically smaller version of President Joe Biden's signature $2-trillion US climate and social spending package.

The original proposal reserved the richest tax credits for vehicles assembled in the U.S. with union labour — a plan experts say would have kneecapped Canada's auto industry.
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But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer reached a deal with holdout West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin on a version of the bill that extended the credits to vehicles built in Canada and Mexico.

The bill is expected to win approval in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives next week before heading to the president's desk.

"It's been a long, tough and winding road, but at last, at last we have arrived," Schumer said Sunday when the outcome was no longer in doubt.

"I am confident the Inflation Reduction Act will endure as one of the defining legislative measures of the 21st century."

West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin struck a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to push ahead with the legislative effort on climate change and health care. 

(Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press)

The bill devotes $369 billion US to measures to combat climate change, while also capping drug costs for seniors, extending health insurance benefits and lowering the deficit.

The climate measures also include incentives for building clean-energy equipment such as solar panels and wind turbines, lowering pollution levels in minority communities and expanding greener factory-farm operations.

Republicans, whose barrage of proposed amendments were swatted down throughout Saturday night and into Sunday, framed their defeat as a win for higher taxes, more inflation and continued dependence on foreign energy.

Ontario cheers U.S. bill proposing EV tax credits, but still no local incentives

Trudeau announces deal to build $1.5B electric vehicle battery plant in Ontario

"Democrats have already robbed American families once through inflation," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. "Now their solution is to rob American families a second time."

The tax credits — which also require eligible vehicles to have a percentage of North American critical minerals in their batteries — have barely been part of the U.S. debate. Critics say it will be years before consumers can benefit.

Crucial win for Canadian auto industry

But for the Canadian auto industry, the stakes were enormous.

Flavio Volpe, president of the Auto Parts Manufacturers' Association, was just one part of an all-hands, year-long effort by the industry, the Ontario government and Ottawa to convince U.S. lawmakers and Biden administration officials to stand down.

"It's a cigar. It's always a cigar," Volpe said when asked how he would mark the occasion.

"In trade wars, by the time it's officially over, everyone else has moved on to the next issue of the day. I've had so many quiet cigars it's become my ritual."

WATCH | PM Trudeau announces EV battery deal in July:

 

Trudeau announces deal with Umicore to build EV battery plant in Ontario]

25 days ago

Duration0:50

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Kingston, Ont. to announce a $1.5 billion dollar deal to build an electric vehicle battery plant in Ontario's Loyalist Townships.

Manchin, a Senate swing vote from a state where Toyota is a major manufacturer, had long been opposed to the idea of leaving foreign automakers out of the EV incentives — but it wasn't clear until just last week whether that would pay dividends for Canada.

The surprise agreement he forged with Schumer marked the culmination of an aggressive lobbying effort that began with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's visit to the White House back in November.

Federal government officials say it was rivalled in scope only by the 2017-18 NAFTA talks, the high-stakes Trump-era negotiations that forged the diplomatic flood-the-zone strategy now known as the "Team Canada" approach.

It targeted a wide array of U.S. officials and lawmakers, and involved at least one face-to-face meeting in recent months between Manchin and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.

BUILD BACK BETTER JR.

US Senate passes $430 billion anti-inflation bill

The bill aims to tackle climate change, lower the costs of medication for the elderly and reduce energy prices, while forcing the wealthy to pay more taxes.



Vice President Kamala Harris voted in the US Senate to break a deadlock between the Republicans and the Democrats

The US Senate started on Sunday passed a $430 billion (€422.3 billion) climate change, healthcare and tax bill, after Vice President Kamala Harris voted in favor of the Democrats to break a tie against unanimous Republican opposition on Saturday.

"The bill, when passed, will meet all of our goals: fighting climate change, lowering healthcare costs, closing tax loopholes abused by the wealthy and reducing the deficit," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said a day earlier.

The package, called the Inflation Reduction Act, will earmark $430 billion in new spending along with raising more than $700 billion in new revenues.

The legislation will now be sent to the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, which intends to take it up on Friday, after which President Joe Biden could sign it into law.
Bill to cut carbon emissions

Democrats say the legislation would address climate change by reducing US carbon emissions by 40% by 2030.

The bill also calls for billions of dollars to encourage the production of more electric vehicles and foster clean energy, offering businesses and families large incentives to encourage purchases of electric vehicles and energy-efficient appliances.

It also seeks to spur new investments in wind and solar power.
Medicare to push back on drug prices

The most popular element of the bill allows Medicare, the government health insurance program for the elderly, to negotiate drug prices as a way of reducing costs. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 71% of respondents support the measure, including 68% of Republicans.

Expiring subsidies that help millions of people afford private insurance premiums would also be extended for three years.

Democrats repelled more than two dozen Republican amendments, points of order and motions, all intended to scupper the legislation. However, they were unable to muster the votes necessary to retain a provision to cap soaring insulin costs at $35 a month on the private health insurance market
New taxes on corporations and the wealthy

The bill's tax provisions include a new 15% minimum tax on some corporations with yearly profits above $1 billion.

Reflecting Democrats' calls for tax equity, it also aims to close loopholes that the wealthy can use to avoid paying taxes.

Play Video 5:31 min USA: Tax me now! Patriotic Millionaires

The bill also imposes a new tax on stock buybacks, expecting to raise an additional $70 billion in tax revenue per year, according to lawmakers.

The US tax agency IRS budget would receive more funding to boost its tax collection.

ss/dj (Reuters, AP, AFP)

RAW RIGHTWING ANTISEMITISM
Soros-linked prosecutor removed by Gov. DeSantis pledges 'I'm not going down without a fight'

DeSantis removed Warren, who has been linked to Democrat-megadonor George Soros, for "refusing to enforce Florida law."

By Madeleine Hubbard
Updated: August 7, 2022 -

Tampa State Attorney Andrew Warren, who Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis removed from office last week, said on Sunday that he is "not going down without a fight."

DeSantis removed Warren, who has been linked to Democrat-megadonor George Soros, for "refusing to enforce Florida law."

THE "LINK" IS DESANTIS HIMSELF SEE BELOW*** THIS IS CALLED AN ECHO CHAMBER

Warren accused DeSantis of "trying to overthrow democracy in Florida" by removing him, and said he is not leaving office.

In his executive order, DeSantis wrote that the governor has the power to suspend any state officer for numerous things, including "neglect of duty" and "incompetence."

DeSantis specifically cited Warren's pledge to not prosecute Florida's pro-life laws. He also mentioned how Warren has not enforced laws regarding trespassing, disorderly conduct and prostitution, among other things.

Warren said he was building a "21st Century criminal justice system we can be proud of."

He criticized DeSantis' decision as "trying to overturn the results of a fair and free election."

Susan Lopez, who DeSantis appointed to take over for Warren in Florida's 13th Judicial Circuit, said: "I have the utmost respect for our state laws and I understand the important role that the State Attorney plays in ensuring the safety of our community and the enforcement of our laws."

*** DeSantis said during an interview this week that prosecutors backed by Democrat megadonor George Soros, like Warren, were doing serious damage to cities and towns across America.

“Here’s what Soros is doing. It’s actually smart on his part, they can’t get these things enacted in a legislature where you’re just gonna let criminals run [amok],” DeSantis said. “So what they do, he will get involved in these Democrat primaries and a Democrat area, he’ll flush a million dollars to get the radical to win the primary then they usually win the general because of the party affiliation difference in the jurisdiction.”

“So then you get them in there and what they do is they want to change the criminal justice system through non-enforcement,” he continued. “So it’s a total end run around our constitutional system. The results obviously have been destructive around the country. But it also really undermines the idea that ours is supposed to be a government of laws, not a government of individual men.”

Crisis and the Everyday: Global Connections, Resistance and Solidarity

Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma and Debbie Samaniego
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Jul 21 2022 •

Anikin Dmitrii/Shutterstock


The uneven geography of the Covid-19 pandemic has alerted us that nations, communities and cities are unequally positioned to deal with its wider social and economic effects. Nowhere is this inequality more visible than at the workplace. Lockdowns and re-openings have been intimately connected to the ways in which specific groups of workers were considered essential but disposable and how safety was redefined not in terms of safety of workers but of an imagined “public”. For the majority of poor workers in the Global South, ‘crisis’ and ‘everyday’, ‘home’ and ‘work’, public and private space are not neatly separable (Bhan et al, 2020). As the pandemic created new inequalities based on who can work from behind a computer screen and who cannot (Prasad-Aleyamma, 2021), existing racialized and gendered vulnerabilities were accentuated (Rogaly and Schling, 2021).

Seeking to reflect on this particular moment that made visible old and new inequalities, as well as the structures of power that facilitate racialized and gendered vulnerabilities, a panel was organized to stimulate a discussion amongst scholars analyzing this impact on workers from various locations. Particularly, the panel sought to focus on the pandemic experiences of workers across the world and what could be learned from the similarities and differences of these experiences, global and local power structures, as well as workers’ collective mobilizations in resistance to their employers’ disregard for their safety.

The roundtable discussion was scheduled to take place on March 1st, 2022, as part of the Association of American Geographer’s Annual Meeting. While the panel discussion would allow us to dialogue and exchange about workers’ struggles around the world, those of us based in UK academia were also fighting for our own workplace conditions through strike action led by the University and College Union (UCU). The ongoing strike by UCU has been a long-standing dispute over pay, casualization, workload, gender and race pay gaps, and pensions. This is in the context of the marketisation and financialisation of the university system in the UK over the last decade and a half. As members of the UCU, three of our panelists withdrew from the roundtable discussion as part of the strike and in solidarity with fellow university workers in the UK. Following their individual withdrawal from the panel, the remaining participants supported the collective withdrawal of the panel as a sign of solidarity and to use this action to bring broader attention to the UCU strike beyond the UK. Below is an excerpt of the statement of solidarity that was shared by Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma, the co-organizer of the original AAG panel, after the panel was withdrawn:

The strike has significance beyond the borders of the UK and beyond the walls of the university. Whether it is in the US or India or Australia or South Africa, the university functions by dividing and dehumanising its workers. Some of us are tenured, some are adjunct, some are waiting for tenure, some are thinking of leaving academia, some have suffered years of sexist and/or casteist behaviour from their colleagues and are simply tired. We are constantly confronted with choices that ask us to prioritise our survival over dignity and individual careers over collective futures. Yet, we all hang on in the hope that things will become better and remind ourselves that research and teaching give us pleasure even as conditions in which we labour are deplorable… The strikers are demanding the withdrawal of drastic reductions in pension benefits and increased workloads. They want justice for their colleagues who are impacted by gender, race, and disability pay gaps. It is impossible for us, the rest of the panelists and conveners who are also university workers, to go ahead with the panel when our colleagues are striking for demands that directly impact all of us in academia. We join them in this strike and are withdrawing the panel in solidarity.​

As we write, the ‘four fights’ dispute led by the UCU continues in the UK. Moreover, in April 2022, pension cuts were implemented whereby ‘a typical lecturer [will] lose at least 35% from their guaranteed retirement income, which for some will rise as high as 41%’ (UCU, 2022). It is beyond the scope of this short piece to discuss the imperative to push against the shift towards a neoliberal university system. Nevertheless, we highlight our own fight within the university in this piece as we see the university space as replicating inequalities, vulnerabilities, and exclusions along similar axes found in other workplaces. Moreover, the solidarity we experienced beyond the UK also mirrors a global solidarity that emerged in the context of workers’ struggles during the pandemic.

Following the withdrawal of the panel and having used the moment to highlight the UCU strike, we agreed to find a way to continue our conversations and to create a collection of short pieces that captured our exchanges regarding the impact of the pandemic on workers and workplaces across the world. The contributions deal with, but are not limited to, the following lines of inquiry:
How has the pandemic changed work and work-places?
What traces will it leave on the ways in which our work-places and working-lives are organized?
How will the pandemic re-work the uneven global organization of production?
In what ways and how much did unions and workers’ associations negotiate with employers over the allocation of workers to roles that involved working from home and others that entailed travelling to work?
How are racialized and gendered vulnerabilities reproduced and reworked during lockdowns and re-openings in different places?

The collection is intended to be an intervention and to stimulate ongoing discussions about workers’ experiences around the world and the vulnerabilities they experienced during the pandemic. In a moment where various states seem to be promoting a ‘return’ to a ‘business as usual’ mentality, it is imperative to continue resisting and mobilizing against those inequalities and vulnerabilities that were seen as acceptable prior to the pandemic. This includes resistance against the normalization of the inequalities and vulnerabilities that have emerged as a result of the pandemic. We emphasize resistance and mobilization as this requires us to go beyond symbolic gestures of solidarity such as the ‘Clap for the NHS’ campaign in the UK during the pandemic. It requires us to actively challenge structures of power and seek transformation.

This examination of the Covid-19 pandemic in relation to how workers experienced ‘crisis and the everyday’ in the workplace continues through the following three interventions:

Labouring geography: towards world-making praxis in a global pandemic by Hannah Schling and Ben Rogaly

Covid in an uneven world: Are we all in this together? by Suparna Bhaskaran, Madhumita Dutta, and Sirisha Naidu

One of the ways that these contributions provoke us to think is by foregrounding the tension between the global nature of the pandemic and the local impacts and responses it elicited. The truncated globality of the pandemic when it affected regions and nations in waves and phases reflected the uneven nature of capitalism and the ways in which it has ordered the world- some nations and regions are more interconnected than others. Some states had more control over the lives of their citizens than others. Some towns and villages had more people who migrated for work than others. Some had more migrant workers who returned when lockdowns were announced than others. As the pandemic progressed, the unevenness of its spread trumped its globality. It has so far defied both optimistic predictions of its liberatory potential and pessimistic forecasts of total control over the people’s affairs by the state.

The contributions in this collection of articles reflect this tension between this truncated globality of the pandemic and the contradictions and conflicts that are immanent within capitalism. These authors discuss the differentiated impact of the pandemic on workers. In doing that, they remind us that it is important to reflect on our own position as teacher- workers and researcher-workers even as we write about workers who may belong in a different world of work. Often exposed to far greater levels of precarity, danger, and exploitation, the experiences of migrant, factory, or agricultural labourers in the workplace are not equivalent to that of many teachers and researchers in academia. Nonetheless, it is worth asking whether there are threads that connect workers across these different worlds of work. The experience of withdrawing from the panel in solidarity with teacher workers of UK academia has taught us that these threads exist- the lives of adjuncts and tenured professors are interconnected as much as the lives of domestic workers and working women are connected or the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh and workers in the fashion world in the US are connected. As Rogaly and Schling (2022) remind us when they quote David Featherstone, solidarity emerges through collective activity – by doing things together. This collection of short essays is the record of a moment of solidarity, of striking together in the world of work called academia.

References

Bhan, G. Caldeira, T., Gillespie, K., and Simone, A. (2020) “The Pandemic, Southern Urbanisms and Collective Life”, Society and Space, available online at: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-pandemic-southern-urbanisms-and-collective-life (accessed 11 July 2022).

Prasad-Aleyamma, M. (2021) “Touch and tech: Labor and the work of the pandemic”, Society and Space, available online at: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/touch-and-tech-labor-and-the-work-of-the-pandemic (accessed 11 July 2022).

Rogaly, B., & Schling, H. (2021) “Labour geography, racial capitalism, and the pandemic portal”, in Andrews, G. J., Crooks, V. A., Pearce, J., & Messina, J. P. (eds.) COVID-19 and similar futures: Pandemic Geographies (Springer, Cham), pp. 381-385.

Schling, H. and Rogaly, B. (2022) “Labouring geography in a global pandemic: social reproduction, racial capitalism and world-making praxis”, Working Paper. Sussex Centre for Migration Research.

Further Reading on E-International Relations

Labouring Geography: Towards World-Making Praxis in a Global Pandemic
The Pandemic, Migrant Essential Workers and the Global Colonial Division of Labour
Covid in an Uneven World: Are We All in This Together
Opinion – Coronavirus: A Global Crisis Waiting for a Global Response
The Global South in Times of Crisis: A China–Africa Relations View
The EU’s Global Health Crisis Management: Past and Present

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York with interests in urban theory, labor migration and the politics of development. She holds a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Debbie Samaniego is a Doctoral Tutor in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on the intersection of decolonial theory, colonial histories, processes of racialization, migration, and the modern international order.

EDITORIAL CREDIT(S)

Felix Mantz

The Pandemic, Migrant Essential Workers and the Global Colonial Division of Labour

Debbie Samaniego
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Jul 21 2022 •


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Prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, the immigration politics of the US and UK centered on the Trump and Brexit campaigns that called for the removal of migrants and the imperative to ‘take our country back’. Such calls blamed the global movement of racialized migrants as ‘disadvantaging’ certain sectors of the white population and invoked notions of a past when the nation’s “white” population supposedly prospered (Bhambra, 2017). With the outbreak of Covid-19 and the increased pressure on key industries, a simultaneous narrative emerged in both countries that celebrated the bravery and commitments of ‘essential workers’ in the UK and workers who ‘feed America’ in the USA (Samaniego and Mantz, 2020). However, the workers who were celebrated for holding the nation together during the pandemic by working in key industries are precisely those workers who are targeted by the UK and US’s anti-migration, racist, and hyper-nationalist politics. This contradiction, and the broader crisis it is arose in, should not be understood as a moment of exception whereby migrants are accepted within colonial/imperial centers. Rather it is better understood as a continuation of the historical practice of excluding the racialized migrant politically so as to include them (i.e. their labour) informally into an economy in crisis (see Robinson and Santos, 2014; De Genova 2013). As such, we should question the category of essential worker and to what extent it exacerbates the vulnerability of migrant and racialized workers. I argue that the mobilization of this category by the state facilitates historical patterns of disposability and necropolitics in relation to racialized migrant workers.

The category of ‘essential worker’

Immigrants make up a significant share of the workforce in US essential industries (fwd.us, 2020). Immigrants – naturalized US citizens, lawful permanent residents, and undocumented migrants combined – constitute 28% of the workforce in agriculture, 23% in housing and facilities, 19% in food services and production, 19% in transportation, 17% in health, and 15% in other sectors (ibid.). Within this immigrant workforce, undocumented migrants comprise the largest percentage in the agricultural as well as housing and facilities industries (11% and 9% respectively). While these industries were deemed essential during the pandemic, they have in fact always been essential in maintaining social and economic conditions within settler colonial and imperial states. This also means that the labor force within these industries was essential prior to the pandemic and continues to be essential to this day: “In California’s Central Valley—which is responsible for nearly one-quarter of the United States’ food supply, an estimated 70% of farmworkers are unauthorized. In Idaho, unauthorized immigrants total 90% of the state’s dairy industry workforce, demonstrating the essential quality of and national reliance on their labor” (Roberts and Burks, 2021).

The US is no exception. Similar statistics exist for other Global North countries. According to Reid et al. (2021: 74), “[m]igrant workers form the backbone of the agricultural workforce in most developed countries. Germany relies on 300,000 season workers, whereas 90% of Italy’s and 80% of France’s agricultural workers are foreign.” In the EU, “[t]he highest share of migrant workers is among the cleaners and helpers (38%), labourers in mining and constructions (23%), stationary plant and machine operators (20%), and personal care workers (19%)” (Fasani and Mazza, 2020: 1). In the UK, migrants similarly constitute a large share of ‘key workers’ in many industries. The six industries with the highest share of migrant key workers in the UK are manufacturing (35%), information and communication (25%), health (22%), professional and scientific (22%), social work and residential care (19%), and transport and storage (19%) (Migration Observatory, 2022). It is important to recognize that these migrant ‘key’ or ‘essential’ workers had been working within these industries prior to the pandemic. Nevertheless, they were often the target of state anti-migrant policies such as ‘zero-tolerance’ policies in the US (Pierce, Bolter, Selee, 2018) and the ‘hostile environment’ in the UK (Goodfellow, 2019). In the US, industries that are known to rely significantly on migrant workers are often the target of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. A few months prior to the global outbreak of Covid-19, ICE carried out the largest single-state raid in Mississippi, detaining approximately 680 undocumented migrants working in food processing plants. Less than a year after this raid, these workplaces and workers were deemed essential to the maintenance of the US food supply chain through the Defense Production Act and ordered to continue running despite mass Covid-19 outbreaks.

While there was indeed a growing recognition that migrant workers were essential workers in many Global North states, the term ‘essential worker’ does not function to highlight this reliance on migrant work. Instead, the term allowed for a distancing by the state from this workforce’s immigration status. The deployment of ‘essential worker’ temporarily blurred the contradictions that arose from the state’s reliance on this workforce during the pandemic and the exclusionary, racist, and anti-migrant policies leveled against it. As such, the category of essential worker allowed various states to call upon the labour of racialized migrants whom they had previously sought to remove from their territories or to some extent deemed as not belonging to the ‘nation’. In this context, it is imperative to understand the category of essential worker as a tool the state mobilized during the crisis, rather than a benevolent gesture of state recognition for these workers.

Necropolitics and Disposability Experienced by Migrant Workers

According to Anderson, Poeschel, and Ruhs (2021), “States in the Global North sought to protect, and in some case[s] even expand the supply of such [essential] workers during the health emergency”. However, during the pandemic, migrant workers experienced heightened vulnerabilities to their health and safety. An examination of state exceptions for migrant workers demonstrates that the state did not seek to protect migrant ‘essential workers’ but rather protected ‘essential industries’ that were ordered to continue production. For example, Anderson et al. (2021) finds that:

the Italian government granted temporary legal status to migrants employed irregularly in agriculture and the care sector in spring 2020; the United Kingdom announced the automatic extension of visas of migrant doctors, nurses, and paramedics; Austria and Germany exempted migrants working on farms and in care homes from international travel bans; in the United States, while normal consular operations were suspended, foreign farm workers were still permitted to apply for and receive work visas (OECD, 2020a).

These exemptions granting mobility across borders or temporary legal status were provided by states to stabilize industries that were in crisis rather than providing extra protection to migrant workers in these industries. Instead, these exemptions tied workers to their workplace, which during the pandemic often increased their risk of exposure to the virus. Moreover, a refusal to work in these ‘frontline’ industries could jeopardize their permission to remain in the country. For example, in the US, the pandemic exemptions for essential workers appeared to exacerbate the vulnerability of migrant workers holding H-2A visas:

There was a more than 70% increase in reported likely labor trafficking victims who held H-2A visas that authorizes the work of migrant agricultural workers in the United States. In addition to other abuses, one-third of these individuals complained about being denied medical attention, while they were deemed essential by the United States Government (see Polaris, 2022).

While various states appeared to recognize essential workers for their ‘sacrifice’, these exemptions marked migrant essential workers as disposable (Coleman, 2020; Dias-Abey, 2020) in a necropolitical sense. Mbembe (2004:27) argues that ‘sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.’ The significant number of deaths amongst ‘essential’ BIPOC and BAME workers in the US and UK, both migrant and non-migrant, illustrates the states’ necropolitics. It is an example of state sovereignty mobilized to determine who mattered and who did not. This necropolitical disposability is evident in various accounts from migrant workers in key industries who expressed the lack of safety measures implemented in the workplace such as social distancing and face masks (Coleman, 2020; Dias-Abey, 2020). The label of ‘essential worker’ did not provide additional protections beyond the gesture politics of the state which did not address the vulnerability of migrant or BIPOC and BAME workers.

The concept of ‘essential worker’ emerged out of the state’s identification of key industries (also described as critical infrastructure sectors) and the legal protections that were implemented for them. These legal protections shielded firms from legal liability in relation to Covid-19 (see Carillo and Ipsen, 2021). For instance, in the US, the Defense Production Act (DPA) ordered beef production facilities to continue operating despite the delayed implementation of safety measures which resulted in massive outbreaks in various plants across the US (Hals and Polansek, 2020; Samaniego and Mantz, 2020). The liability protection granted to employers under the DPA made it easy for the meat-industry, which saw massive Covid-19 outbreaks, to deny compensation claims filed in relation to Covid-19 related illnesses, medical expenses, and deaths (Polansek, 2020). In other words, the label of ‘essential worker’ mobilized by the US state and codified by the DPA did not protect workers. It protected industries by ensuring that a workforce which has historically been marked as disposable due to its immigration status bears the frontline dangers of this crisis.

This critique of the state’s deployment of ‘essential worker’ as a political category should caution against the dangers inherent in a politics of recognition (Coulthard, 2014) that does not yield material or structural changes for workers.

Mobility and Colonial Divisions of Labour

The disposability and vulnerability of migrant essential workers is part of a longer continuum of colonial labor practices in settler colonial and imperial states. Various scholars have demonstrated the unequal power relations between (settler-) colonial and imperial states and migrant workers (Gonzalez, 2006; Karuka, 2019; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018). Robinson and Santos (2014: 6-7) argue that:

State controls over immigrant labor and the denial of civil, political, and other citizenship rights to immigrant workers are intended not to prevent but to control the transnational movement of labor and to lock that labor into a situation of permanent insecurity and vulnerability… The creation of these distinct categories (“immigrant labor”) replaces earlier direct colonial and racial caste controls over labor worldwide.

In line with Robinson and Santos’ argument, the category of ‘essential worker’ similarly builds on deeper categories of colonial and racial control of labour. Historically, settler and imperial states have controlled the mobility of colonial subjects by implementing restrictions as well as temporary exemptions to their presence in imperial/settler colonial centers to fulfill labour needs. ‘The Braceros’ in the USA and the ‘Windrush generation’ in the UK are serve as two examples of temporary exemptions granted for the migration of colonial and racialized subjects due to labour shortages. Specifically, both the USA and the UK faced domestic labour shortages during and after the Second World War. They sought to resolve these labour shortages by encouraging migration from Mexico to the USA and the Caribbean to the UK.

The USA established the Bracero Program in 1942, granting nearly 4 million Mexican workers temporary contracts up until the early 1960s (Ngai, 2004). Braceros (the name given to these migrant workers) were recruited to work in labour intensive industries, including farms, railroads, and factories. The Bracero Program helped avert the crisis emerging from labour shortages during the war. As labour shortages subsided after the war, fewer contracts were issued (Mize and Swords, 2010). By 1954, over a decade after the Bracero Program was initiated, the state implemented legislation to ‘repatriate’ undocumented Mexican migrants from the US. Through ‘Operation Wetback’, established in 1954, the state began the mass deportation of approximately 1.3 million Mexican migrants (Mize and Swords, 2010), as well as US citizens of Mexican heritage (Astor, 2009). The Bracero Program demonstrates a cycle of temporary exemptions made for racialized migrant workers when the state experiences a crisis, followed by legislation that facilitates their removal once it is averted. The effects of these racialized labour cycles are still evident today as Latin American workers continue to constitute the largest part of the labor force in the US agricultural sector. In 2018, statistics of hired farm labourers showed that 57% of workers were Hispanic of Mexican origin, while an additional 7% were Hispanic ‘Other’. Put differently, at least 64% of the labor force is Hispanic, not accounting for workers that are undocumented and might not respond to surveys.

In a similar way, the UK encouraged the migration of ‘Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ to address labour shortages exacerbated by the Second World War. According to Shilliam (2018:85-86), ‘[i]n 1946 the Labour government set up a foreign labour committee to examine shortages in the industries essential to postwar reconstruction: coal, textiles, steel, construction and agriculture. With the lack of workforce estimated at almost one million, the government turned, necessarily, towards the importation of labour power’. Goodfellow (2019:43) explains that ‘[t]he Second World War had left the UK in economic decline’, thus ‘Post-war reconstruction required workers, and the official line was that the country at the centre of the Commonwealth would take anyone willing and able to work, regardless of colour’. Approximately half a million people arrived in the UK between 1947 and 1970 from the West Indies (National Archives, 2022). Similar to Braceros, these British citizens migrating from British colonies were legally allowed to work in the UK to avert the labour crisis experienced by the imperial state. However, by the 1960s, there were growing concerns over the increased presence of non-white Commonwealth citizens in the UK and the ‘government wanted to make it more difficult for people of colour to come to the country’ (Goodfellow, 2019: 47). As a result, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act placed restrictions on their mobility by requiring Commonwealth citizens to acquire ‘an employment voucher from the British government to come and live in the country’ (ibid.). In this way, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act alongside subsequent immigration acts, continued to erode the right to mobility of Commonwealth citizens within the imperial centre. This right was now tied to some extent to the labour needs of the British government.

Conclusion

It is important to place temporary exemptions that tie migrant ‘essential workers’ to their workplace during the pandemic within the context of such histories of colonial labor relations. It is crucial to understand the disposability and vulnerability of ‘essential workers’ in relation historical processes that order mobility and labor across the world. As others have remarked, ‘the association of some kinds of dangerous, low-status, fast-paced, insecure work with racialized people or with foreign nationals is a feature of racial capitalism’ (Rogaly and Schling, 2021: 382). The historically constructed racialized division of labor created and upheld by settler colonial and imperial states continues to produce violence and injustices against current and former subjects of Empire. Many Global North states rely on an immigration system that allows for the exploitation and disposability of migrant workers in specific labour intensive and dangerous industries. For instance, visa programs such as the H-2A visa in the USA tie migrants to their employer, making them precarious and exploitable. These visa programs are not too dissimilar to the Bracero Program’s temporary work contracts or the work voucher scheme the UK government implemented in the 1960s. The exemptions made for the presence of migrants in various Global North states during the pandemic operate squarely within a global colonial order, one that relies on immigration and border controls to enforce a necropolitical and racialized division of labour.

By connecting colonial processes and histories to contemporary politics, it becomes clear that addressing these issues requires more than reform to the immigration system. Instead, it requires the abolition of borders, border regimes, and the colonial labour systems they sustain. We must refuse a politics of recognition and gesture politics, and instead contribute to radical internationalists, pro-migrant and anti-racist labour movement.

References

Anderson, B., Poeschel, F., & Ruhs, M. (2021) “Rethinking labour migration: Covid-19, essential work, and systemic resilience”, Comparative Migration Studies, 9(1), 1-19.

Bradley, G. M., & de Noronha, L. (2022). Against Borders: The Case for Abolition. Verso Books.

Carrillo, I. R., & Ipsen, A. (2021) “Worksites as Sacrifice Zones: Structural precarity and Covid-19 in US meatpacking”, Sociological Perspectives, 64(5), 726-746.

Dias-Abey, Manoj (2020) “Disposable workers, essential work: migrant farmworkers during the COVID pandemic”, Migration Mobilities Bristol, available online at: https://migration.bristol.ac.uk/2020/08/11/disposable-workers-essential-work-migrant-farmworkers-during-the-covid-pandemic/ (accessed 19 June 2022).

Gonzalez, G. G. (2015) Guest workers or colonized labor?: Mexican labor migration to the United States. (London: Routledge).

Goodfellow, M. (2019). Hostile environment: How immigrants became scapegoats. Verso Books.

Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E. (2018). The coloniality of migration and the “refugee crisis”: On the asylum-migration nexus, the transatlantic white European settler colonialism-migration and racial capitalism. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees/Refuge: revue canadienne sur les réfugiés, 34(1), 16-28.

Pierce, S., Bolter, J., & Selee, A. (2018) “US immigration policy under Trump: Deep changes and lasting impacts”, Migration Policy Institute, 9, 1-24.

Reid, Alison, Elena Rhonda-Perez, and Marc B. Schenker (2021) “Migrant Workers, Essential Work, and COVID-19”, American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 64(2): 73–77.

Robinson, W., & Santos, X. (2014). Global capitalism, immigrant labor, and the struggle for justice. Class, Race and Corporate Power, 2(3), 1-16.

Rogaly, B. (2021) “Commentary: Agricultural racial capitalism and rural migrant workers”, Journal of Rural Studies, 88, 527-531.

Rogaly, B., & Schling, H. (2021) “Labour geography, racial capitalism, and the pandemic portal”, in Andrews, G. J., Crooks, V. A., Pearce, J., & Messina, J. P. (eds.) COVID-19 and similar futures: Pandemic Geographies (Springer, Cham), pp. 381-385.

Shilliam, R. (2018) Race and the undeserving poor: From abolition to Brexit. Agenda Publishing.

Subcomandante Marcos (2001) Our Word is Our Weapon – Selected Writings (London: Seven Stories Press).

Further Reading on E-International Relations

Crisis and the Everyday: Global Connections, Resistance and Solidarity
Labouring Geography: Towards World-Making Praxis in a Global Pandemic
Covid in an Uneven World: Are We All in This Together
Opinion — Paradiplomacy in Times of Pandemic: The Paths Ahead
Oil Power Politics amidst a Global Pandemic
Opinion – The Fragile Power of Populist Leaders in a Pandemic

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Debbie Samaniego is a Doctoral Tutor in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on the intersection of decolonial theory, colonial histories, processes of racialization, migration, and the modern international order.

Away from Political Parties into Lifestyle Politics: Young People in Advanced Democracies

Intifar Chowdhury
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Jul 23 2022 •

Annette Shaff/Shutterstock

In an era of dramatic decline in youth electoral participation (Blais and Rubenson 2013; Klingemann 2014), it is particularly surprising that better-educated and better-informed younger generations in long-standing democracies are disengaging from traditional democratic practices such as voting and aligning with a political party. We know that young people engage differently in politics, preferring ad-hoc, issue-based, elite-challenging forms of participation (Norris 2003; Sloam 2016). Do young people participate differently because societal transformations have created differential generational characteristics? If so, are these lasting characteristics, or are a sudden change in political behaviour that is particular to a cohort and fades away in subsequent cohorts?

Most explanations follow some version of the generational replacement phenomenon, which capitalize on earlier works (Dalton, 2008; Inglehart, 1977; Klingemann, 2014; Norris, 2011): younger cohorts with distinct characteristics replace their older counterparts in the electorate. The most prominent and well-tested theory, the social modernisation account, emphasizes a gradual increase in generational gaps due to subsequent value change. Younger cohorts are more economically secure – meaning they are more educated, politically sophisticated, socially independent, critical citizens who have post-materialist values compared to survivalist values. Citizenship, to them, is a right and not a duty (Dalton, 2007). Hence, abstention is less stigmatizing. Abstention occurs because these cohorts, by virtue of their enhanced cognitive resources, are more critical of the workings of their government (Dalton, 2007; Ferrin & Kriesi, 2016; Norris, 1999). Their increasing share in the electorate will progressively reduce turnout and partisan alignment.

A key idea that parallels this theory is the cognitive mobilisation (CM) thesis, which explains the diminishing role of political parties as mobilising agents. According to Inglehart (1970:47), cognitive mobilisation is the process where formal education “increases the individual’s capacity to receive and interpret messages”. Cognitive mobilisation in advanced industrial democracies has led to the increase in the number of apartisans (Dalton, 1984, 2007) – sophisticated individuals with no party ties; who have enough cognitive resources (from formal education) to grapple with the complexities of politics. Despite their limited electoral experience, cognitive mobilisation is expected to be higher in the younger generations. The cognitive mobilisation thesis indicates a generational component (Dalton, 1984, p.286): younger citizens have higher education levels compared to their elders and therefore can better engage with political information (more easily available through mass media; Baker et al., 1981).

But how does the cognitive mobilisation thesis stand today? Donovan (2018) questions the temporal and dynamic manifestations of cognitive mobilization. In 2022, for example, should we still expect these social forces such as rising levels of education and changes in mass media to have the effects they were said to be having in the 1960s? If social forces have operated since then, would we not expect expanded access to education to have neutralised differences in cognitive mobilization across age cohorts at some point? Related to this, have some applications of the cognitive mobilisation thesis mistaken a lifecycle effect (in any era, young people vote less and protest more) for generational change? How does the thesis stand today given the new, fragmented media environment with self-selection of news (Lodge and Taylor 2000; Nyhan and Reifer 2014) and news avoidance (Prior 2005)?

All said, voters in advanced democracies are different today – the world has changed. A larger proportion of citizens have high educational attainment, and access to mass media is fundamentally different. Parties play a different role. This article reviews a cognitively sophisticated electorate as an explanation for decline in electoral turnout and rise in partisan dealignment. Using survey data in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and multi-level models to control for competing lifecycle and period effects, it shows that societal modernisation is a long evolutionary process, creating electorates which increasingly mobilise cognitively across generations. Overall, this article provides a clear and robust understanding of how exactly electorates are changing in advanced democracies. It also underscores the need for political parties to look for new ways to reconnect with cognitive apartisans who do not necessarily need them.


What is a generation?

A generation or birth cohort refers to a time span representing social change. Troll’s (1970) idea Zeitgeist is similar to Mannheim’s (1927; 1959) generational unit where members develop distinctive world views during late adolescence and early adulthood (typically between the ages 18-27). There are two premises embedded in this argument (García-Albacete 2014). First, young people are more susceptible to their political context and influenced by societal transformations during their formative years. So, if you socialised in an era where women in the workforce is a norm rather than an exception, then you will demand more women’s rights, and be sensitive to violations of such rights.

Second, values, orientations and attitudes formed during this time will persist over the course of one’s life. Persistence refers to the tendency to structure inputs, as well as reject dissonant items, based on previous cognitive design (Ryder, 1965: 856). If youth participation in traditional forms is declining due to unique cohort characteristics, then we can expect a long-term change in the participation of citizens in advanced democracies.

To understand the concept of generation, it is important to understand what it is not. A generational effect is different to a lifecycle effect that manifests during the developmental stage – for instance, the phenomenon that political involvement is not the same during youth and adulthood. Interest and involvement with politics increases with the accumulation of resources as one approaches middle-age and then decreases again with certain events like retirement.

For a generation effect, the socio-political environment is different from events that give rise to period effects which impact the population’s political engagement in general, regardless of age. But these events can leave stronger impacts on those in their formative years than others. Therefore, these manifest as long-term consequences for newer cohorts and not their older counterparts. Similarly, older events may have impacted older cohorts in a way that does not impact newer cohorts which did not socialise under those old events.

This brings me to my next crucial point: these time effects present the age-period-cohort (APC) identification problem where they are exact linear functions (Period – Age = Cohort) (Yang & Land 2006, 2008). In short, when we find evidence for one of these three, we cannot be confident of which of the three is driving the effect. This means a robust analysis would attempt to estimate the unique effect of one while controlling for the other two. Although existing studies provide theoretically robust explanations for youth political behaviour, there is a lack of methodologically rigorous enquiries on which of the three time effects – age, period or cohort (APC) – drives youth engagement.

Cognitive mobilisation: a continuous process?

Social transformations such as the increase in education levels, development of new technologies and the rise of economic wellbeing have given rise to higher levels of cognitive engagement among younger cohorts. This has also paralleled decline in traditional political participation. Dalton (1984, 2007, 2012) and Norris’ (1999a) answer to the paradox implies that citizens in advanced democracies possess skills and resources needed to politically engage and do not need traditional institutions like parties to provide strong cues. This process of cognitive mobilisation has increased apartisans – sophisticated citizens who pay more attention to the performance of the government and react to it. This idea of ‘critical citizens’ is applicable more to younger cohorts who have reached higher levels of education and are more familiar with new technological tools. Therefore, the modernisation process results in an increase in ‘elite-challenging’, at the expense of ‘elite-directed’, political participation. (Inglehart, 1990; Inglehart and Welzel, 2005).

How much do key assumptions about CM carry forward over time in the established democracies? Dalton (1984; 2008) has long maintained that cognitive mobilisation is a constant (continuous) process where forces of change continue to disrupt especially younger age cohorts. But did he then refer to social transformations as a long term evolutionary societal change continually concentrating postmaterialist values in the electorate? Are these linear developments different from period effects brought about by major historical events, which are country-specific impacts on generations and thus are separate from societal transformations that could have affected several countries?


Donovan (2018) reasons there are three possible scenarios in which CM manifests. Under the first scenario, there was a finite period of societal transformations after WWII, but this has ran its course, producing contemporary, better-educated and more-interested cohorts. Donovan refers to this as the ceiling effect, meaning there were limits to how many people experienced the major transformative political effects of education and innovations in media. There may have been a phase shift which was limited to the mid-20th century, where local prints and radio mediums provided wide and novel access to global perspectives. For example, a person’s access to information about the Vietnam War may have been fundamentally different from a similar person’s access to information about WWII, but not all too different (or of lower quality) compared to information about the Iraq War.

The second scenario is that an ongoing, continuous process of political transformation where increasing proportion of citizens in the established democracies continue to become more educated and more interested in politics. Indeed, in his recent work, Dalton refers to “a changing public” (Dalton 2013:29). It is a dynamic process where the “the need for [partisan] cues declines as the political skills of the voters increase and information costs decrease,” and where “the dramatic spread of education” is leading to an expansion of political sophistication (Dalton 1984:265). This process may have started at the post-WWII time when very few people had access to quality secondary or tertiary education. This changed over time where increasingly larger proportions of a country’s population are experiencing more education. This means that it could take several generations, or centuries, for most or all citizens to reach higher levels of cognitive sophistication that results from increased access to education.

The changes in mass media can also be seen as a continuing process. In the 1950s, print newspapers and radio were replaced by broadcast televisions as a lower-cost medium to access political information. By the 1990s cable televisions and global satellite technologies outperformed broadcast television in scope, quantity, immediacy and cost-effectiveness of information. What further transformed and broadened access to political information is the growth of mobile devices, Internet and social media in the 21st century. Undoubtedly, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok have changed the modern political campaigning scene. New media was instrumental in destabilising authoritarian regimes during the Arab Spring. As a continuing transformation, advents in technologies are increasing the proportion of people who are interested and involved with politics.

Finally, under the third scenario, CM is a process unique to a particular generation, where some point in the past young people may have become less partisan but more interested in politics, but those generational differences are no more evident. Donovan (2018) argues that whereas the first two scenarios reflect broad social forces affecting many countries simultaneously in the same manner, unique cohort effect scenarios could be more idiosyncratic. He uses the US example: social and political changes during the post-WWII through to the 1960s period shaped a generation with high distrust of government. This was precipitated by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, experienced by the first wave of first-generation university students coming of age at that time. Or there may have been influence of forces such as a short-term sorting in the two-party system precipitated by the civil rights era. Consequently, the proportion of highly interested (younger) might increase – but as this generation ages and is replaced, the changes that might be attributed to cognitive mobilisation could decay over time.

The key question really is whether greater formal education, and greater use of mass media after the 1950s left advanced democracies with new batches of high cognition apartisans and cognitive partisans – where countries quickly reached a fairly static new equilibrium mix of traditional partisans, cognitive partisans, and apartisans. Or are electorates, over time, increasingly defined as being cognitively mobilized such that traditional partisans are gradually being replaced by apartisans? Donovan’s (2018) crude, albeit commendable, analysis doesn’t find evidence for CM be a continuous process in Australia and America, looking into partisanship and political interest, but it does not control for confounding lifecycle and period effects and does not look into a variety of advanced democracies. There is still, therefore, a need to test proposed hypothesis: Each subsequent cohort engage less with traditional, elite-directed practices such a casting a ballot compared to previous cohorts. If there is a gradual decline across generations, then CM is a continuous process rather than a one-off generational feature.


Analysing survey data

Here, I use post-election survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) Integrated Module Database (IMD) between 1996-2016. For the purposes of this study on advanced industrialised democracies, I subset the dataset to include respondents from thirty-five Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, who have experienced similar socio-historic transformations and political arrangements. This is important to assume that individuals from the same generations underwent similar experiences in their formative years across the different countries.

I use two indicators – turnout and party identification – as measures for traditional engagement with politics. The two survey questions are: Did you cast a ballot? and Do you feel close to a political party? They both are dichotomous variables with yes/no responses. The turnout variable reports “yes” when the respondent casts a vote in any of the following elections: main election, presidential elections in round 1 or 2 in the survey year, elections in the lower or the upper house. The party identification variable reports “yes” to any of the following questions: Are you close to any political party? or Do you feel closer to one party?

The main independent variables of interest are the three features of time progress. In line with previous research on generational trends, these are the age[1], period and cohort effects (Dassonneville, 2013; Grasso, 2014; Smets & Neundorf, 2014). I operationalise the generation variable by transforming the continuous year of birth/age variable into a five-category cohort variable, comprising: Post-WWII generation (birth year: 1926-1945, era: 1946-1965); 60s-70s generation (birth year:1946-1957, era: 1966-1977); 80s generation (birth year: 1958-1968, era: 1978-1988); 90s generation (birth year:1969-1979, era: 1989-1999); and, 00s generation (birth year:1980-1998, era: 2000-2008/16).

Individual level engagement is affected by other socio-demographic factors. Thereby, I also include individual-level socio-economic controls (Grasso, 2013; Grasso and Guigni 2022), namely gender (Henn and Foard, 2014), household income and education (Solt, 2008; Verba et al., 1995). Gender is a binary variable with two values (male or female). The household income variable reports the income quintiles based on the gross annual income, before tax and deductions, from all sources of all members in the family. Education attainment is a categorical variable based on the highest educational attainment and not enrolment (none, primary, high secondary, post-secondary (non-university), university (and beyond)). Education is well-regarded as a key factor which boosts political participation (Stoker 2006; Tenn 2007; Sloam 2012; Flanagan et al. 2012). In order to investigate whether education has an independent effect on the dependent variables, or it moderates the relationship between generations and the dependent variables, I also include an interaction term in my models.

A challenge of this study is to disentangle the highly collinear age, period and cohort effects using hierarchical models. The age variable represents the biological process of aging. A cohort (or generation) refers to a group of individuals who were born in the same time and had formative ages in the same political, economic and social context (Mannheim, 1928). A period variable, like the year of the election/survey, which effects all ages in the same way and varies independent of individuals. In repeated cross-sectional surveys[2], individuals are clustered in cells cross-classified by two types of social context – cohorts and periods (Yang & Land, 2008, p.86). Fixed models fall short in accounting for the hierarchical structure of the data (Yang, 2008, p.212). In contrast, multilevel mixed models acknowledge the hierarchy whereby individuals sharing the same context are nested in cohorts and periods (Bell & Jones, 2014, 2015). In this study, the hierarchical age-period-cohort (HAPC) models[3] with random intercepts account for error-correlation (Dassonneville, 2013; Smets & Neundorf, 2014, p.43). This attempts to break the linearity of the APC model.

Figure 2 presents the findings from two cross-classified multilevel models which distinguish generational effects from period effects, while also taking into account age differences in attitudes and behaviours towards democracy. In these models, age is a fixed effect (same regression intercept for all individuals) whereas generations (cohorts) and election years (period) are specified as random effects (where regression intercepts vary among groups). Each ordinal response variable has been re-coded as binary variable for the sake of parsimony; hence, all models are regressed as logit models. Only the fixed effects of the two models are presented in coefficient plots in Figure 2: here, the estimated coefficient of each variable (with 95% confidence intervals) show how the effect of each predictor differs from zero. Those in the zero-line have no significant association with the outcome variables.


In all cases, age-squared term sits on the zero line, meaning that there is no association between one’s age and the two outcome variables. This suggests no lifecycle effect: people with a lower age are no different from those who are older. Therefore, some other time effect is at play here. It is evident that generational differences are significantly different from zero: each younger cohort, significantly have lower odds of engaging with the two traditional practices – voting and party affiliation- compared to the reference category, Post WWII generation. This is strong evidence in support of the CM hypothesis that each subsequent cohort – even when controlling for lifecycle and period effects – is gradually disengaging from traditional, elite-directed, conventions forms of participation.

Looking at socio-demographic variables, females have lower odds of voting (although not significant) and aligning with a political party. Respondents from the upper household income quintiles have higher odds of engaging compared to those with a low household income. This is as expected (Lachat, 2007).

Education has a positive but independent effect on each generation. An edu*cohort interaction variable yields insignificant coefficients for all the outcome variables. It is noteworthy that, among all independent factors, university education has the largest positive association with both democratic behaviours. There’s something beyond education, because when we disaggregate education from generational effects, there are still fixed generational effects. This means that there are generational characteristics or values that are accumulating across generations, that explain much of the variation in traditional engagement.

What does this mean?

This article finds that generations differ due to slow evolutionary changes (Ryder, 1965, p. 851). The underlying mechanism is characterised by rise in education and the development of new technologies, which are not disruptive events like a war or pandemic but accumulate permanent resources across generations. That is, these linear developments are different from period effects brought about by major historical events and are societal transformations that have affected several countries.

Although education has an independent positive effect on all outcome variables, the current study demonstrates that decline in participation occurs even amongst the better educated. In line with modernisation theory, the CM offers an explanation for this surprising trend. Dalton (2007) insists that cognitive resources can shape both engagement and disengagement. Focusing on partisanship, he distinguishes two groups with high cognitive resources based on their affinity to political parties. They are cognitive partisans and apartisans (Dalton, 1984, 2007). Cognitive partisans have strong party ties together with psychological involvement in politics in places where party cues lack. Despite their limited electoral experience, cognitive mobilisation is higher in younger generations (Dalton, 1984, p.268): younger citizens have higher education levels compared to their elders and therefore can better engage with the political information (Baker et al., 1981). As such, one might expect cognitive partisans to engage in traditional activities such as voting as well.

But what explains disengagement better than cognitive partisans is the second group – the apartisans. Apartisans have high cognitive resources like higher education but lack party ties. Although these individuals do not need party cues to make political decisions, it does not necessarily mean that they will not engage in electoral processes. It is true, nonetheless, that cognitive resources such as higher education allows one to distinguish between effective and inactive participation. The vote, for example, in its aggregate form is powerful but not blunt; that is, it provides very little information and does not guide the behaviour of the elected. For the individual, the vote is weak because they cannot disaggregate the effectiveness of their vote in terms of the extent to which they moved the decision makers to align with their preferences (Verba, 1967, p.73).

In contrast to voting, participation in activities that do not aim to achieve a policy goal, but rather bring selective group or individual benefits, may not be as powerful in the aggregate sense. Yet, it is powerful for the group or individual in terms of conveying a specific message. It appears that better-educated younger cohorts are reluctant to engage in processes that have unclear policy implications. And the analysis above shows that this is because of the increase in cognitive apartisans over time in a continuous CM process.

In an era of declining control of political parties, the ever-evolving communication media has provided broadened opportunities for mobilisation (Kriesi 2008, pp. 156–7). High hopes placed on new technologies as a quick, low-cost and suitable channel for mobilizing citizens (Norris, 2002, pp. 207–12), in an era of weakened party loyalties and the weakening of parties as mobilization agents. Social media, for example, provides a powerful tool for organizing protest rallies and petitions and lowering the costs – both time and money wise – of mobilizing people. It has hosted and provided exposure to various social movement organisations, which tackle a variety of issues relevant to younger people. This media environment is characterised by less distinct boundaries between political and non-political activities, lowering the thresholds of engagement (Ekström and Shehata, 2018). Therefore, political parties need to revaluate their connections with voters as newer generations replace older counterparts in the electorate. Using the new media to this end may be a good strategy, but there is a need for more research in understanding the dynamic impacts of the new media on young people.

Figure 1. Younger generations are better educated than older generations. Source: CSES IMD (1996-2016).

Figure 2. Coefficient plots with 95% confidence intervals for fixed effects from cross-classified hierarchical models.

Notes

[1] For the purposes of the analysis, those below the age of 18 and over 90 are removed such that all respondents have had an opportunity to participate. Younger citizens have very little chance to participate while older people have mobility issues (Grasso, 2014, p.69). To avoid issues from multicollinearity, I replace the age variable with a mean-centred age-squared term (age-47.55 squared). When fitting a regression model, multicollinearity- when predictors are highly correlated- can be problem. This can make the estimates very sensitive, which may erroneously change in response to minor changes in the model or the data. None of the other predictors are highly correlated except for age and cohort (r= 0.91), obviously because both, one’s age and the generation one is in, depends on their birth year. Mean-centring the age-squared variable reduces Pearson’s correlation coefficient, r, from 0.91 to 0.11. This transformation is useful also because an expected curvilinear relationship of age, especially with turnout (Smets & Neundorf, 2014, p.45).

[2] In repeated cross-sectional surveys, individual respondents from the same sampling frame (i.e. countries) are surveyed repeatedly over time (after each national election).

[3] The HAPC cross-classified random effects model (CCREM) for a dichotomous dependent variable can be specified as a logistic regression model (see chapter 3 for details).

Further Reading on E-International Relations

Post-Truth and Far-Right Politics on Social Media
Recognition in Global Politics: The Challenge of Images and Technology
Technology and Tyranny
Critical Security Studies Needs to Better Consider the Intricacies of Social Media
Social Media Europe and the Rise of Comedy in Global Diplomacy
The Continuing Russian Campaign to Divide the Democratic Party in the USA

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Intifar Chowdhury is an Associate Lecturer at the Australian National University’s (ANU) School of Politics and International Relations. Her doctoral research tackles the important question of whether young people are turning away from democracy. It constitutes a quantitative enquiry on advanced democracies using survey data from comparative databases. Prior to this, she obtained a double degree in Science (Biochemistry/Genetics) and International Relations (Honours) at ANU. Currently, she works as the Senior Survey Research Officer for the longitudinal Post School Destination (GENERATION) Survey, conducted by the ANU’s Centre for Social Research and Methods in collaboration with the Australian Department of Education, Skills and Employment.