Youth Participation in Democratic Life

Stories of Hope and Disillusion

Bart Cammaerts, Michael Bruter, Shakuntala Banaji, Sarah Harrison, Nick Anstead, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137540218
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is concerned with the contexts, nature and quality of the participation of young people in European democratic life. The authors understand democracy broadly as both institutional politics and civic cultures, and a wide range of methods are used to analyse and assess youth participation and attitudes.

1

Introduction: The Challenge of Youth Participation

This book emerges out of an extensive research project that was undertaken for the European Commission’s Education, Audio-Visual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) between 2012 and 2013 during which we conducted a multi-method comparative analysis of the normative definitions and orientations towards contexts, practices and experiences of democratic participation by young people across six countries in the European Union. Our research team consisted of the five authors – Bart Cammaerts, Michael Bruter, Shakuntala Banaji, Sarah Harrison and Nick Anstead – all based at the London School of Economics and Political Science in London and eight methodologically trained field research assistants in carefully selected northern, southern, eastern and western regions of Europe: Austria, Finland, France, Hungary, Spain and the United Kingdom.1

The research process took us through a number of recursive iterations in relation to the key concepts of youth, democracy and participation, leading us to rearticulate and reassess the significance of some questions: To what extent is youth participation in Europe in crisis? What are the causes of and explanations for the assumed crisis? What potential solutions are there that could rekindle young citizens’ engagement with and participation in their political systems?

However, before we could answer these questions, other even more pressing ones presented themselves in relation to how participation and democracy are being defined, whether some category of young people are left out by the way in which they are organised and how these definitions can and do impact on and inflect the findings of studies such as the one we discuss in this book. We explored these key concepts and questions, as well as the implications of disjunctures between normative and empirical accounts of democracy and participation via an analysis of key academic and policy literature on these and related topics such as voting, representation, activism, volunteering and exclusion. We also had recourse to reanalysis of data sets drawn from previous studies.

After establishing our own orientation towards the conceptual landscape (see chapter 2), we conducted a large-scale, stratified, representative survey targeting youth in the age groups 15 to 17 and 18 to 30, drawn up by us and administered by the survey company Opinium in seven countries; expert interviews with policy, political and grassroots stakeholders from six of them; a field-based e-participation simulation/experiment with older school-goers; and a set of focus groups with young people in a cross section of social and political strata from the most activist to the least, from the average students in local youth associations schools and colleges to those in homeless shelters, prisons and outside all institutional settings.

1.1Democratic survival – concepts, definitions and research questions

One of the most pressing questions our societies are faced with today is whether our representative democratic system can survive a sustained collapse in political participation and the decline in legitimisation that goes with it? Will the democratic boat stay afloat if a large portion of a generation falls overboard in a storm of political crises of legitimacy, as well as a perceived lack of representation and political efficacy? European democratic systems are facing a profound crisis, which is often treated as one that nobody can do anything about. At one level, this crisis concerns the nature and quality of political participation by young people in European democratic life; at another level, it concerns forms of social, economic and political exclusion, both structural and self-chosen.

Between the early 1970s and the early 2010s, on average, turnout in major national elections in European democracies declined by over 20 percentage points (Bruter and Harrison, 2014). Not only has this decline been registered among young voters but young citizens who abstain in the first two elections when they are allowed to vote are highly likely to become chronic abstentionists. Reciprocally, they are more likely to become regular voters if they go to a polling station when they first become eligible to vote (ibid.).

Youth participation is, however, not just a question of participation rates or of waiting for disinterested youths to ‘come of age’ and join the democratic participatory bandwagon. It is also a question that goes to the very heart of the sustainability of the representative democratic model. It concerns how young people will express assent, affirmation or discontent if they feel that traditional modes of expression of both affirmation and discontent are ineffective and inadequate. Ultimately, this is a question about whether as societies – as political communities – it is acceptable to exclude a generation or part of a generation of citizens from democratic life.

1.1.1Defining youth

When we refer to young people, we refer to a diverse and heterogeneous societal group with a variety of complex identities – psycho-social, politico-economic and educational. Hence, we do not treat young people as a monolithic group whose members all feel the same, want the same things, or have convergent interests.

Distinctions between young people and older adults are culturally influenced and change over time. In some countries young people remain dependent on their parents for much longer than in others and this tends to be exacerbated in times of economic crisis. While some analysts take age as a ‘numeric’ indicator to differentiate youths from adults, others argue for functional or situational conceptions of the youth category (for instance, as students or as people who live with their parents). The research discussed in this book was based on a comparative study and it is important to be clear about how the category of youth was defined. It is also important to clarify whether this category is defined ‘positively’, that is, as an analytically meaningful life stage in its own right, or ‘by default’, that is, as the years between childhood and adulthood, however they are defined.

For the purpose of this study the focus is on young people in the age bracket from 15 to 30 years, but at the same time we do consider youth to be above all a hugely important and highly formative stage of life.

1.1.2Defining political participation in the 21st century

Defining political participation is a complex but very important task. We will address the literature on participation in more detail in chapter 2, but it can be noted that it is complex, highly debated, and often contradictory, mixing descriptive and normative, top-down and bottom-up dimensions.

In this book, beyond the more descriptive components of participation such as those classically discussed by Almond and Verba (1963), we choose to embrace the normative consequences of participation. In this sense, political participation is critically related to the perception of being part of a political community and therefore fundamentally related to notions such as representation and efficacy. Political participation is also crucially about being able to make a difference through participating, that is, being able to affect a course of action or an outcome of a decision. Positioning participation as such necessarily implicates the notion of power, which we approach at once as structural power, agency or empowerment, and efficacy (external efficacy being literally defined as the perception of one’s influence on the system).

Political participation thus refers to the way citizens engage in forming opinions and taking actions to bring about change in society. It can take different forms. In the framework of this book the following participatory practices will be addressed:

• •Participation by young people in representative democracy: standing for or voting in elections or being members of political parties.
• •Young people’s involvement in participatory structures: promoting involvement of young people through participating in youth organisations, issue-based NGOs or community media.
• •Participation in public debate: on youth or community issues; opinion-shaping through the written press, broadcasting or online.
• •Seeking information and learning about democracy: participating in mock simulations of political processes, attending training sessions or learning at school, engaging in youth organisations.

The question of where political participation starts and finishes and what it precisely constitutes is a highly contentious issue in political science. It is generally, but not unanimously, agreed that participation goes beyond traditional modes such as voting and joining political parties, but at the same time other modes of participation, such as demonstrating, debating and volunteering, are highly contentious. For instance, there is no consensus on whether reading about current affairs or talking about politics constitutes participation. While we do adopt a broad view of political participation which goes beyond the act of voting, we also believe that political participation needs to be connected to both feeling part of a political community and making a difference out there and thus with processes of representation as well as processes of power. We reject attempts to disentangle the notion of participation from processes of inclusion, representation, power and empowerment (see also Eulau and Karps, 1978; Carpentier, 2011).

1.2Is youth participation in democratic life in crisis?

1.2.1Scope of the book

The existing political science literature overwhelmingly argues that participation matters – be it for society, a vibrant democracy, legitimate policy outcomes or empowered citizens (Almond and Verba, 1963; Pateman, 1970; Barber, 1984; van der Eijk and Franklin, 1996; Held, 2006; Franklin et al., 2009; Hart, 2009; Soroka and Wlezien, 2010). In this literature it is thus argued that participation has the potential to foster a sense of citizenship, to make policy processes more transparent for all citizens and accountable to young citizens in particular (Almond and Verba, 1963; Lister, 2007). Participation in the democratic process is deemed to make citizens feel efficacious; it enables them to identify with their political system and leads to an increase in civic behaviour (Coleman (with Rowe), 2005; Bruter and Harrison, 2014). It has furthermore been found to increase systemic legitimacy and sustainability, encourage responsibility amongst elites and increase cohesion among subgroups of citizens. Participation is conducive to helping young people build self-confidence, take initiative and acquire and test skills that are relevant for the workplace and in their personal lives, such as communication, negotiation or teamwork.

However, at the same time we can also observe a serious crisis in the legitimacy of democracy and its ability to protect the interests of ordinary citizens and of young people in particular. This crisis is commonly countered by a discourse of increased participation and of ‘bridging the gap between the governed and the governing’ (Wind, 2001). However, it is important to state here that a discourse of participation, as witnessed by participation becoming a popular contemporary buzzword, is not necessarily the same as a praxis of participation. Hence our insistence throughout the book that participation is intrinsically linked to power and the ability to make a genuine difference. The danger of participation for participation’s sake without any real change or of giving young people a voice without anyone listening to what they actually say is that it will engender even more frustration, disenchantment and a negative sense of efficacy.

Young citizens are at the heart of what many observers deem to be a ‘crisis of representative democracy’. The more alarming accounts proposed by advocates of ‘crisis of democracy’ theories emphasise a perceived distrust of political systems, institutions and social elites by European citizens and by young citizens especially (see Kaase et al., 1996; Mishler and Rose, 1997; Seligman, 1997; Newton, 2001). Social scientists have documented what many see as the growing dissatisfaction of citizens with what national governments and the EU can offer to them as citizens (Norris, 1999; Torcal and Montero, 2006).

A BBC study (2005) showed, for example, that European citizens tend to be more cynical and less trusting than those who are citizens of countries in other regions of the world, be it towards political leaders, religious authorities, administrations, justice systems or the media, and young citizens are more distrusting on average than older c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Challenge of Youth Participation
• 2 Youth Participation: Theoretical Positioning and Methodology
• 3 Participation of Youth in Elections: Beyond Youth Apathy
• 4 Youth Participation in European Policymaking: Representation and Limits to Participation
• 5 Youth Participation Beyond Voting: Volunteering and Contestation
• 6 Participation of Youth In and Through Media: Traditional and New Media
• 7 Youth Participation and Exclusion: Towards Equal Treatment in Public Space, Education and the Workplace
• 8 Concluding Thoughts and Tribulations
• Notes
• References
• Index