Abstract
In contrast to what may have been the case a decade ago, youth in Europe are currently significantly engaging with politics through and beyond formal modes of political participation. About 64 per cent of registered voters aged 18–24 went to polls in the recent EU referendum in the UK. Young people took active part in the violent attacks in Paris and Brussels as well as in peaceful demonstrations against such attacks in 2015 and 2016, respectively. While many young people have set up community initiatives to support refugees in Greece or Germany, others commit themselves to violent acts under the influence of extremist right-wing ideologies.
How do we define ‘participation’, ‘politics’ and/or ‘Europe’? What are the pertinent figures and views by the young people themselves as well as by other relevant stakeholders regarding youth participation in political life? Filling a significant gap in the relevant literature and research, Youth Participation in Democratic Life: Stories of Hope and Disillusion can be read as a highly valuable and timely contribution to mapping the current modes and levels of political participation by young people across a wide range of European countries (Austria, Finland, France, Hungary, Poland, Spain and the UK).
Youth Participation in Democratic Life presents the theoretical frame, methodology and results of a large-scale research project led by renowned scholars from a variety of relevant disciplines such as media and communication, political science, political psychology and youth studies. It reviews a wide range of data generated through an innovative mixed-methodological design (combining documentary analysis, comparative secondary data analysis, large-scale representative survey of pre-voters and young voters, an experiment in e-voting, stakeholder interviews and focus group discussions).
The book consists of two introductory chapters with relevant theoretical and methodological contributions and five empirical chapters on: elections (Chapter 3), European policymaking and representation (Chapter 4), volunteering (Chapter 5), participation through traditional and new media (Chapter 6), non-participation and exclusion (Chapter 7). It analyses and assesses the contexts, nature and the diversity of young people’s participation in European democratic life and explores their views regarding the political elites who appear to run the current so-called ‘representative democratic systems’ as well as their attitudes towards volunteering, protesting, taking part in grassroots community-based initiatives and employing traditional and new media for purposes of political participation. The book concludes with a very good overview of the general issues that emerged through the data analysis, which leads to a series of concrete and constructive recommendations for improving modes and levels of youth participation across Europe.
It is commendable that the book explores views and modes of participation by highly diverse young populations through sampling pre-voters along with young voters from 7 European countries, thereby including ‘active’ as well as ‘excluded’ youth. The book does not cover though refugee youth, which was the case in other publications by the authors (de Block et al., 2005). It could also be interesting to shed more light on right wing youth by linking the analysis to further work by the authors (Bruter and Harrison, 2011).
The main argument of the book is that youth may not regularly engage with the standard forms of political participation not because they are apathetic, but rather because the political offer does not match their concerns, ideas and ideals of democratic politics. Diverse groups of young people feel that ‘those in power do not listen’. Youth are therefore critical against mainstream politics and traditional media and feel that they must not merely be given a voice, but also possibilities to participate in follow-up processes and to further shape the relevant debates and policy implementation. This finding fits very well with studies of youth in non-European contexts (cf. Kontopodis, 2014) as well as with recent theorizing on youth development and socialization (Stetsenko, 2016).
While official discourses fetishize certain and marginalize other forms of participation, the authors extend the term ‘democratic life’ so that it covers every form of political participation young people may be involved into: from volunteering to NGOs or sharing political views on Facebook to participating in peaceful or violent demonstrations. This insightful assertion can lead to the expansion of the notion of ‘participation’, and also addresses the question, whether all forms of participation are considered as solely positive and desirable per se. When considering, for example, the recent initiatives where young people were involved in violent acts of extremist groups or when referring to young people’s participation in far right-wing movements, ‘participation’ can have totally different outcomes to what ‘participation in democratic life’ entails.
Taking this analysis as a point of departure, future work could add further dimensions to the scope: How do young people in various European countries experience ‘authority’ in institutions such as the school, the family or the church? How does ‘participation’ affect the ‘private’ or ‘personal’ spheres, which may entail gender-related power relations, family and peer-group dynamics, and other forms of micro-politics? What is the potential that everyday and liminal expressions of young people’s political participation may entail?
Participation is obviously a complex, multidimensional issue; in this frame, the wide array of analysis and the close attention to detail render Youth Participation in Democratic Life a valuable and much needed contribution to the research literature in youth studies and the relevant disciplines such as political science, education, media and communication.