The Youth Political Engagement Pattern in Media

Lee, Khai Jun (2020) The Youth Political Engagement Pattern in Media. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

Youth are always portraying as future leader of a country by the government or politics. Unfortunately, age discrimination among youth are still happening and it limits the voice of youth in politics which directly or indirectly influence on the youth political interest. However, the existence of new media has changed how the political world run nowadays with it features of likes, shares, comments and everyone can use it anytime and anywhere. These features make youth to be unavoidable in politics world because even though they did not consume political news actively, political news yet will still pop up on their social media walls. Slowly, the youth political engagement is influence by the media. Thus, with the new media existence, political participation is distributed into two groups which is offline and online participation. With the method through online questionnaire form and interview among youth, most of the youth update their political news through social media, however shocking results find out on youth have higher trust and more prefer using traditional media to obtain political news. Both media did increase on political awareness, but political interest among youth are decreasing. The youth political engagement pattern in media are coming with behind reasons which influence on their engagement level or interest in politics. Thus, although youth are disinterest or reject to involve in any political activities, but youth tend to vote and have a high awareness of responsibility as a voter in Malaysia. However, this study reveals that the youth are having low political engagement level because their negative perceptions on politics through the political news obtain from media. Overall from the results obtain and analyze, political engagement level can be increase among youth as long as the politicians in Malaysia politics shows a good role model to the youth and serve the citizens sincerely to decrease the negative perception from the youth. Directly or indirectly, youth will respect and start to get interest in politics.