Declining electoral participation among young people poses a growing threat to the legitimacy and sustainability of representative democracy. Despite widespread concern, timely and comparative indicators of youth political disengagement remain limited—particularly those capturing early predispositions toward voting. This study addresses this gap by exploring whether intentions to vote, expressed by eighth-grade students across countries, can serve as reliable early-warning indicators of future electoral behavior, and by identifying the individual-level factors that best explain these intentions. Using data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), we first align students’ self-reported voting intentions in ICCS 2009 and 2016 with official age-specific turnout rates from each cohort’s first national election. The findings reveal a statistically significant, moderately strong association between early intentions and actual voting behavior: countries with higher proportions of students reporting that they are likely to vote tend to experience higher turnout rates when those cohorts reach voting age. In the second part of the analysis, we use pooled microdata from three ICCS cycles (2009, 2016, 2022; N ≈ 316,000 students) and estimate fixed-effects models to identify consistent predictors of students’ voting intentions while accounting for time-invariant country-level characteristics. Results show that students’ political interest is the most powerful and consistent predictor. Other significant contributors include civic knowledge, political self-efficacy, trust in political institutions, and parental political interest. Importantly, once these psychological and cognitive factors are taken into account, background characteristics such as gender or socioeconomic status lose statistical significance. These results underscore the predictive value of adolescent voting intentions and suggest that such intentions can serve as a practical tool for early diagnosis of potential turnout issues in future electorates. Moreover, the findings highlight key malleable factors—particularly political interest, knowledge, and efficacy—that can be targeted through civic education policy and practice. By focusing on these levers, education systems and policymakers may be able to foster greater democratic engagement and counteract the trend of political disengagement among youth across countries.

Schulz, W., Ainley, J., Fraillon, J., Kerr, D., & Losito, B. (2010). ICCS 2009 International Report: Civic knowledge, attitudes and engagement among lower secondary school students in thirty-eight countries. International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). https://www.iea.nl/publications/studyreports/ international-reports-iea-studies/iccs-2009-international-report Schulz, W., Ainley, J., Fraillon, J., Losito, B., Agrusti, G., & Friedman, T. (2018). Becoming citizens in a changing world: IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2016 International Report. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73963-2 Schulz, W., Ainley, J., Fraillon, J., Losito, B., Agrusti, G., Damiani, V., & Friedman, T. (2023). Education for citizenship in times of global challenge: IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2022 International Report. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-65603-3