Higher youth voter turnout could change tone, content and outcome of political debate

[Daradon]

Well modern historical evidence. But yeah, I'm right there with ya, as I've been posting in multiple threads now. The day of conservative governments equaling less government and less spending are way in the past. Since the 50's or 60's maybe?

And as far as fiscal responsibility, well that definitely changes from government to government, leader to leader. All parties can get irresponsible with waste pretty easily. But that can be argued that's different that growing government, or government interference on the free market. It's just pork barreling, which seems to be equally likely whichever party you choose.

In fact, the constant would probably be along the lines of the age of the government and how comfortable they are they are going to stay in power. It's natural for them to get greedy.

[octothorp]

I don't really think you can extrapolate the effect that a higher youth turnout would mean a massively different outcome, unless you broke it down by riding.

It may very well be that young voters are more likely to make their decision to vote based on whether their vote may have an impact - whether they're in a perceived swing riding or not, while increasingly older people vote out of principle, regardless of local races.

Before deciding if I believe the assertion in the OP that the election could have swung on higher vote turnout, I'd need to see if youth turnout was the same in swing ridings as it was in non-swing ridings. I suspect you'd find that youth voting is already much higher in swing ridings than non-swing, meaning that increased youth vote might make non-swing seats shift a slightly to the left, but not flip too many conservative seats to liberal or NDP. Total speculation on my part.