AnnaBelle Medina ’25 and Julia Armeli ’25
The Wesleyan Survey Lab conducted a pre-election survey in November 2024 of Wesleyan students to gauge student sentiment about the 2024 election. In it, we asked questions to gather information about how, and to what extent, students engage politically. This curiosity came at a time where there was widespread opportunity for students to politically engage, particularly due to the rise of encampments in response to global conflict and the 2024 election itself. Of the 600 Wesleyan students analyzed in this study, 78% reported engaging in at least one political activity other than voting in the past year. We found that non-institutional, or acts of power outside of the political system (e.g. attending protests, boycotting products) were more popular than institutional activities, or acting within the political system (e.g. working for a political campaign, calling representatives). Additionally, self-identified “leftist” students engaged in more political engagement activities on average than liberal, moderate, and conservative students. Lastly, while most activities were positively correlated, some activities had particularly strong relationships with one another. For example, people who participated in protests were especially likely to boycott products and contact their representatives.
To measure student political engagement, this survey asked: “Many people try to engage with politics in ways besides voting. In the past year, have you done any of the following?” It then listed various activities, such as attending protests, posting on social media, boycotting, signing petitions, and others, which respondents were able to select. We categorized these activities into two groups to represent the nature of engagement: institutional or non-institutional activities, also including the non-engaged students (those who did none of the activities) as a separate group.
Our categorization is based on one of the six dimensions of political engagement as defined by Patrick J. Conge, where he distinguishes between behaviors that are “sponsored and guided” by systems of government and behaviors that are initiated amongst citizens themselves outside of government. We used this information to define institutional activities as those that utilize existing government services and offices to attempt to enact change, including writing or calling a representative. Non-institutional activities would include those where students pursue alternatives outside of direct government resources, including protesting or rallying.
Most Common Activities
Figure 1 shows how often each of 10 various activities were selected, with students given the choice to select as many activities as they had completed. The most frequently selected activity by students was “Signed a petition, either on paper or over the Internet,” while the least frequently selected activity was “Worked as a poll worker/election judge.”
Among Wesleyan’s student population, we found that non-institutional activities are more popular than institutional activities: Of the 600 Wesleyan students1 surveyed, 74% engaged in at least one non-institutional behavior, while 45% of students participated in at least one institutional behavior.
Figure 1
Number of activities
Our survey also asked about students’ self-reported ideology, ranging from very liberal to very conservative, with students also able to select “something else” and self-describe their ideology or select “haven’t thought much about it.” We found that 10.9% of Wesleyan students who answered the survey identified as “something else” when asked what best represents their ideology. Students who selected this answer were given a text box to self-describe their ideology. To assess this population, we coded the open-ended responses to categorize where they would fit, and we found that 81% of students who answered “something else” listed an identity that fit into a category we labeled as “leftist” (8.8% of the sample). Many of these students self-described as “leftist,” although some self-described with terms such as “socialist” or “progressive.” Progressive was included with leftist since students who provided this answer specifically chose not to self-identify as liberal.
To examine the relationship between ideology and participation we developed an index of political engagement using the responses to the political engagement activity question. We then created four groups to represent the general ideologies of the student population: leftist, liberal, moderate and conservative. Figure 2 shows that students who identified as leftists engaged in the most activities. On average, those who identified as moderates were the least engaged in political activities.
Figure 2
Activity Type By Ideology
Patterns of engagement by ideology are similar across both activity types (institutional and non-institutional). In both categories, leftists were the most engaged, while moderates were the least. Notably, some differences appear between liberals and leftists when breaking down engagement by type. While 55% of leftists participated in an institutional activity—comparable to 48% of liberals—92% took part in at least one non-institutional activity, surpassing liberals by 15 percentage points. This indicates that leftist students are not only more politically engaged than other students, but particularly more engaged in non-institutional activities.
Figure 3
Which activities are associated with one another?
Figure 4
Conclusion
These findings provide some insight into how college students today engage politically. Political engagement appears to be important to a lot of Wesleyan students, with the majority having participated in at least one form of political engagement beyond voting in the past year. Most of this engagement was through non-institutional avenues (e.g. protests), while institutional forms (e.g. working at polls, volunteering or working on a campaign) were less common. This pattern is particularly true among students who self-identified as leftist, who were more politically active, particularly in non-institutional activities. Notably, contacting a representative appears to pair frequently with non-institutional political engagement activities. Overall, these findings emphasize the preference for non-institutional activism amongst Wesleyan students, and prompt further research into whether this is a trend across university students as we see a rise of activism in response to global conflict and U.S. politics in the post-2024 election era.
1This post only analyzes the 600 Wesleyan students (out of 616 total respondents) who indicated their ideology was liberal, conservative, moderate, or provided an answer that the authors subsequently coded as “leftist.”
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Adriana Begolli and Will Livingston for their contributions to an earlier version of this project.