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DRAFT PAPER
Magdelina Kitanova
explored. While, most scholars have analysed the issue of political engagement among
young people in a single country only, this paper adds contribution to a comparative
political participation among young people using survey analysis across 28 European
countries. I argue that socio-demographic factors and contextual factors are crucial
predictors when it comes to formal and informal political participation among young
people in Europe with variations across democracies. The results indicate that while
age, social and educational factors (at individual level) matter, individuals living in
different countries (for example advanced and new democracies) who have specific
people in Europe. Although some scholars and previous studies suggest and find some
evidence that new democracies are not that politically active as advanced
democracies (Letki, 2003; Bernhagen and Marsh, 2007), the results in this paper
indicated the opposite for some of the EU countries. The findings, for both formal and
informal political participation, raise fresh concerns about the levels of young
young people and politics. Youth disengagement is still a major issue facing British
democracy (see Norris, 2003; Farthing, 2010; Furlong and Cartmel, 2012; Henn and
Foard, 2012; Hay, 2007). This is a vital challenge facing not only Britain but other
relationship between citizens and parties. Today, the youth are increasingly
Europe, which is analysed (Ministry of Justice, 2007). Moreover, young people are not
only disengaged but it also looks like they are apathetic and even alienated from
most European Union countries (Pharr and Putnam, 2000; Torcal and Montero, 2006;
Norris, 2011; Papadopoulous, 2013; Allen and Birch, 2015). The 2015 UK General
Election is an exact example of that with young people’s turnout of 43%, and more
than 25% of the young people remained not registered to vote. Contradictorily, in the
Scottish Independence Referendum when the 16 and 17 year olds were given the
opportunity to cast their vote, the results showed that 89% of all citizens aged 16 to
results from an EU funded MYPLACE survey in 14 European countries revealed that 42%
2015). Thus, it can be argued that the youth are not a politically apathetic generation
but might be disengaged from the traditional political system and formal political
participation.
political activities such as voting. It adopted diverse activities such as people being
With the changing nature of political actions, new forms of political participation
have emerged and it is claimed that the youth engage more in politics through the
new political activities as young people nowadays are very different from their
parents’ generation (Norris, 2003;Spannring et al, 2008; Kestilä-Kekkonen, 2009;
One research area that requires better theorising and testing is what are the
and informal political activities. Therefore, the research questions addressed in this
paper are: What are the socio-demographic factors and contextual predictors of
universal in any democracy? What is the relationship between these predictors and
This paper seeks to address the variations of youth participation across Europe.
participation. Second, I introduce a new data set of Eurobarometer survey (No. 375)
on young people aged 15 to 30 from 28 European countries asked about their forms of
factors and formal and informal participation is applied controlling for countries to
establish relationships and differences between age groups. In the fourth and fifth
section, the analyses reveal that while social and educational factors (at individual
level) matter, individuals living in different countries (for example advanced and new
Stoker. 2006; Fieldhouse et al, 2007). Many studies reveal that there is a tremendous
comes to voting. Yet, some of the recent studies show that young people are not
apathetic and disengaged, but they have turned to alternative forms of political
petitions, volunteering, and engaging online (Norris, 2003; Spannring et al, 2008;
Sloam, 2016).
The youth are often seen as ‘disengaged’, ‘alienated’, and apathetic when it
youth disengagement in single countries such as Britain. The British Social Attitudes
report (2015) also revealed an important statement about the declining youth turnout
as in 2013 only 57% of the respondents felt they have the duty to vote compared to
76% in 1987. For example, it can be clearly recognised that there has been a long-
Union countries (O’ Toole et al, 2003). These results are in sync with the conventional
wisdom that youth are disengaged from the political system (Wring, Henn and
Weinsten, 1999).
choosing other forms of politics that are not traditional and seem more meaningful to
them (Spannring et al, 2008; Sloam, 2013). When it comes to the ‘non traditional’
forms of participation, young people are more likely to get involved than their
parents and grandparents (Norris, 2003). These theoretical expectations are forming
organising idea here is that young people feel excluded from the traditional political
system (O’ Toole, Marsh and Jones, 2003) resulting in recent changes in the way they
can engage in politics (Harries, Wyn and Younes, 2010; Henn and Foard, 2012; Sloam,
2013).
countries (Norris, 2003; Spannring, 2008; Dalton, 2009; Sloam, 2013; 2016). There is
not enough research on how young people’s participation in politics varies between
contextual factors are crucial to youth engagement drawn from different theoretical
The role of age, social class, education and gender is widely acknowledged
(Verba et al, 1995; Stolle and Hooghe, 2009; Vecchione and Caprara, 2009; Cainzos
and Voces, 2010). Social class and educational history appear to be crucial predictors
of political engagement (Tenn, 2007; Sloam, 2012; Holmes and Manning, 2013).
Especially, when it comes to young participation in politics, education and social class
have most bearing on young people’s political engagement (Henn and Foard, 2014).
Remarkably, another line of argument that is prominent is that the length of time a
person has been in full-time education appears to have huge impact on political
mentioned findings hold when it comes to youth participation in Europe in formal and
informal politics.
The idea that contextual factors can cause differences in youth participation is
studied in recent years (Fieldhouse, Tannmer, and Russel, 2007; Grimm and
Pilkington, 2015; Soler-i-Marti and Ferrer-Fons, 2015; Sloam, 2016). Political context
suggest that growing up in a certain context and environment would make young
(Torney-Purta, 2008) and a main expectation of this paper is that there will be
comes to traditional politics (Barnes, 2004; Bernhagen and Marsh, 2007; Letki, 2013),
disengaged and alienated from the traditional forms of politics. Equally, there is an
expectation that young people may be active in new forms of political activities. My
influence on political participation (Parry et al.,1992; Brady, 1995; Verba et al, 1995;
Stolle and Hooghe, 2009; Vecchione and Caprara, 2009; Cainzos and Voces, 2010;
Henn and Foard, 2014). In order to test whether this is the case among young people
H2: Higher levels of education are associated with higher levels of youth
engagement.
engagement.
H4: Young people are more engaged in advanced democracies compared to new
democracies.
Finally, I test an expectation that in newly established democracies, young
H5: Young people are more engaged with informal politics in new
have not considered the cross-national level. There are expectations that
political activities (Sloam, 2016). However, the current existing studies of youth
participation say little about the potential differences between countries and
argue that while social and educational factors (at individual level) matter,
individuals living in different countries (e.g. advanced and new democracies) which
have specific demographic characteristics mater, and this will structure patterns of
This paper draws upon data from the Eurobarometer (2013, No. 375)
of young people’s predictors of political engagement. The dataset contains only young
respondents which is the targeted age cohort of this study, consisting of 13,427
respondents aged 15 to 30. The survey’s aim was to analyse young EU citizens’
at local, regional and national level. The limitation of this data is that it does not
represent the full population. Clearly, it would have been preferable to study and
analyse a broader range of age groups, but the data available from the Eurobarometer
survey does allow us to compare how people differ in terms of diverse age groups and
compare and contrast for instance 18 year olds with 30 year olds, and allow for a
meaningful comparison for the purpose of this study and the testing of the
hypotheses.
The existing secondary data from the Eurobarometer 375 survey was used as
what age the respondents left school, their highest level of education, and their
1
When
the
survey
was
carried
out,
Croatia
was
not
a
member
of
the
European
Union;
it
which is a limitation as it would have allowed testing the theoretical claims reviewed
in this paper. Clearly, as the data is from a study of young people, the ‘occupation’
question is not necessarily most accurate for determining social class patterns of a
respondent, as the majority of answers to this question are ‘still in education’, but all
of the answers to the “What is your occupation?” question were grouped in different
categories formulating the social class independent variable as explained later in the
question, which prohibits the use of an income measure in the analysis. However,
with age, education and social class included in the analysis, the lack of income
measure does not constitute a significant problem within the confines of the
of activities with questions related to both formal and informal modes of political
not used as determinants for the dependent variables due to the structure of the
questions being Likert scale. The survey questions used to construct the dependent
variables of this study are categorised as formal vs. informal activities in Table 1. To
assess and test the hypotheses, three dependent variables were formulated related to
political participation. All dependent variables are derived using a binary measure of
Eurobarometer 375 questionnaire (see Table 1). The variable “formal” reflects
whether a person has participated in traditional political activities, where in this
paper, a formal political activity means voting and being a member of a political
activities, where in this paper “informal” political activities are viewed as being a
constructed that considers whether or not overall participation varies combining the
2007; Furlong and Cartmel, 2012; Holmes and Manning, 2013). However, there is by
participation in both formal and informal politics. To test for the effect of socio-
include a categorical variable for education that indexes whether or not respondents
are still in education and when have they left school. In order to consider the effects
categorical one including values for lower class, middle class, higher class,
respondents who are not working, and respondents who are still in education. The
data for this variable was mapped with the NS-SEC (National Statistics Socio-economic
I also include new and old democracy variables in order to test whether age of
countries and test the assumption that youth political participation varies within
different democracies and individual countries. Countries that fall under the category
of “new democracy” were identified using Dunn’s (2005) and Muhlberger and Paine’s
(1993) studies where new democracies are considered to be EU countries that became
democracies post 1988, which includes 11 countries (past communist countries and
countries that used to belong to the Soviet Union). As advanced democracies are
Europe in 1970 (Portugal, and Spain) are now classified as established ones for the
Analysis
participate in formal politics, but a person from country B with the same socio-
identify the crucial predictors associated with youth engagement in politics, a binary
demographic factors such as gender, age, education and social class have an impact
on the political participation of an individual (Verba et al, 1995; Stolle and Hooghe,
2009; Cainzos and Voces, 2010; Henn and Foard, 2014). The statistical analyses of the
data test whether or not these theoretical claims hold in regards to the
variables in the regression analysis. In addition, the theoretical model of this study
suggests that there is a significant relationship between contextual factors and young
informal political participation and assess whether or not there are differences in
political participation (Lieberman, 2005). The binary regression also tests what
demographic and contextual factors and analysing the relationship between them and
determinants
The decline of youth participation in politics has been discussed above. Several
authors suggested that young people are disengaged and alienated from the
traditional forms of political participation (Russell, 2004; Stoker, 2006; Hay, 2007).
However, a descriptive bar chart that demonstrates the Eurobarometer data in terms
that Generation Y are not apathetic but have orientated towards new forms of
political engagement (Norris, 2003; Spannring et al, 2008; Sloam, 2013). Therefore,
binary regression is used to investigate and explore the differences across different
developing models that assess what are the determinants for formal, informal and
general political engagement among young people in the EU countries. The regression
models also explain why some individuals are more politically engaged than others by
age and run a descriptive analysis to determine what does the data tell us initially
respondents from the Eurobarometer study participate more in formal politics than in
informal with 60% compared to 54%. One feature of this data set is that it only
not provide an opportunity for comparison across the age groups of the whole
differentiate young people age with one category being “15 to 23 year olds” and
another one being “24 to 30 year olds”. I run a descriptive analysis to check whether
or not there are variations in young people’s engagement depending on their age and
as seen in Figure 2, the results indicate that the “15 to 23” age group engage more in
In line with earlier studies (Verba et al, 1995; Stolle and Hooghe, 2009;
Vecchione and Caprara, 2009; Cainzos and Voces, 2010), a common trend that
engagement. To test these theoretical claims and to either reject or confirm H1, H2
and H3, I modeled participation using binary logistic regression as a function of age,
As the descriptive analysis above suggests, there are some important differences
within age groups when it comes to different levels and forms of political
participation of the youth. Therefore, the models are firstly presented with a reduced
set of variables, which allows to observe what is the effect of adding “age” to the
Formal
Informal
Political
Political
Participation
Participation
Variables
Coef
Coef
Table 2 Formal Political Participation: Age Base Regression Model controlling for countries
youth engagement reveals that respondents aged 24 to 30 are nearly 5 times more
likely to participate in formal political activities than the reference category (young
people aged 15 to 23); and they are 28% less likely to get involved in informal political
activities than older cohorts. Table 2 indicates that there is an inverse relationship
between age and informal politics because as a respondent gets older, the odds of
them participating in informal political activities decreases which suggests that the
younger a person is, the more likely they are to be involved in informal political
factors, social class and education are added to the regression models. It is suggested
and expected that participation equals to a function of age plus a series of socio-
political participation which includes voting and being member of a political party;
different organisations (defined earlier in this paper); and Model 3 refers to general
the following paragraph reveals the results from the binary logistic regressions
commenting on how much does education matter and how much does social class
informal political activities in EU countries (see Table 3). In all of the three regression
models, I control for country fixed effects, the results are reported in Table 3 but the
Model 2 Model 3
Model 1
Formal Informal
Variables General Political
Political Political
Participation
Participation Participation
Age (15-23) Reference Reference Reference
*p<0.05 **p<0.01
Table 3 Regression models' results: Model 1 (general participation), Model 2 (formal participation), Model 3 (informal
participation
The results from the regression suggest that both education and social class
have a positive and significant effect in all modes of participation as seen in Table 3.
This characterization supports the findings from earlier studies (Verba et al, 1995;
Stolle and Hooghe, 2009; Vecchione and Caprara, 2009; Cainzos and Voces, 2010;
Education
participating in formal political activities than a person who has left school at 18 or
below. These findings denote an important distinction that the longer a person has
stayed in education; the more likely they are to engage in formal political activities.
In order to compare this finding with informal political participation, I look at Model 2
that suggests that a person who left education at 19 or above is 34% more likely to
Moreover, if a person is still in education, they are 81% more likely to take part in
demographic predictors, it is important to note that the regression analysis reveal the
strong support for the expectation summarised in the second Hypothesis (H2) that
higher levels of education are associated with higher levels of youth engagement.
Social class
Table 4 and 5 reveal that there are some statistically significant variations in effects
of social class across formal and informal participation of the youth. The odds of a
comparison to a lower class person. The analyses for formal and informal participation
suggest similar result and imply that respondents who are not working are less likely
32% less likely to engage in informal politics than a lower class respondent, with these
results from the general and informal political participation models being statistically
politics than their counterparts from a lower social class (to be exact, a respondent
from a higher social class is about 40% more likely to participate in politics than a
respondent from a lower class). This implies that, as predicted, higher social class is
For the purpose of this study, each of the 28 EU countries from the data set
before 1988 were classified as “advanced” and the post-communist countries were
participation in politics, two new dichotomous variables are derived: new democracy
and old democracy that were included in the regression models; and then the model
suggested that participation is defined as a function of age and the other socio-
Model 2 Model 3
Model 1
Formal Informal
Variables General Political
Political Political
Participation
Participation Participation
Age (15-23) Reference Reference Reference
*p<0.05 **p<0.01
Table 4 Regression models' results: Model 1 (general participation), Model 2 (formal participation), Model 3 (informal
participation
In comparison to the previous regression models, it is obvious that there is only
change in the odds ratios of countries that are classified as new democracies which
countries.
The existing literature predicts that contextual factors are crucial and cause
Russel, 2007; Grimm and Pilkington, 2015; Soler-i-Marti and Ferrer-Fons, 2015;
Grasso, 2016; Sloam, 2016). In line with that, the results of the regression models
featuring the age of democracy variables, suggest that political engagement among
young people varies within different ages of democracies. Young Europeans who live
in one of the newly established democracy are 47% less likely to be politically
supports the findings from earlier studies that participation is lower is post-communist
2013). This broadly confirms H4 that predicts that the youth are more politically
the results from the regression models controlling for countries reveal that there are
established democracies. For instance, the results indicate that political engagement
is low in the UK, which is also evident in previous studies reporting that the
traditional forms of politics (Russell, 2004; Henn, 2012). Young people in Britain are
participation in politics across the EU countries together with Cyprus, Hungary, and
France. Respondents from new democracies are 62% less likely to engage in informal
politics than respondents from advanced democracies, which does not uphold the
democracies.
different European countries and across forms of participation and age of democracy.
It is interesting to note that countries with low levels of engagement in formal politics
with odds ratios below 1) have higher level of engagement in informal politics (with
odds ratios over 12). It appears that countries with high ratios of youth participation in
formal activities (Belgium, Netherland, Latvia) also have very high ratios of
Although some scholars and previous studies suggest and find some evidence
that new democracies are not that politically active as advanced democracies (Letki,
2003; Bernhagen and Marsh, 2007), the results from the regression analysis indicates
the opposite for some of the countries. For instance, a respondent from Latvia is 1.4
times more likely to participate in general politics than a respondent from France.
2
All
of
the
countries’
odds
ratios
are
in
relation
to
the
reference
category:
France.
Conclusion
determines young people’s engagement in politics. Most scholars have analysed the
issue of political engagement among young people in a single country only, but this
politics.
political participation among young people, and to explore the relationship between
Referring back to the research questions posed at the beginning, the regression
participation among young people are age, education and social class, which is in
consistent with the previous studies (Vecchione and Caprara, 2009; Stolle and
Hooghe, 2009; Henn and Foard, 2014). In terms of the contextual predictors of
political participation among young people, there are differences between countries
and especially new and old democracies. It is suggested based on the binary
characteristics of the country they live in. The regression models suggest that
political participation among young people is not universal in any democracy but
varies within different types of democracy and individual countries. In addition, the
results from the regression models indicate that there are statistically significant
people.
Overall, the study found out that respondents who are aged 15 to 23 are more
importance that a higher social class and a higher education are associated with
higher political participation. Respondents from higher social class participate more in
politics than respondents from lower social class. Respondents who are not working
are less likely to engage in any form of politics than respondents who are in
education. And respondents who are still in education are more engaged in informal
2.9 times more likely to participate in formal politics than a respondent aged 18 to 23
which indicates that the older the person is, the more likely they are to vote and
participate in any kind of formal politics. The regression results also suggested that
the longer a person has stayed in education, the more likely they are to participate in
formal politics which is consistent with previous studies’ findings (Henn and Foard,
2014; Flanagan et al, 2012). Moreover, if a person is still in education, they are more
education is 81% more likely to be politically engaged than a respondent who has left
education at 18 or below). And a respondent from a higher social class is 1.4 times
more likely to participate in any form of politics than a respondent who is from a
Although some scholars and previous studies suggest and find some evidence
that new democracies are not that politically active as advanced democracies (Letki,
2003; Bernhagen and Marsh, 2007), the results from the regression analysis indicates
the opposite for some of the countries. For instance, a respondent from Latvia is 1.4
times more likely to participate in politics than a respondent from France. However,
voting is a habit and respondents who live in advanced democracies engage more in
The results from the regression models suggest that a young person from a EU
country with the following characteristics: aged 24 to 30, left school at 19 or above,
have a higher social class and live in a country that is an advanced democracy is more
This paper leads to questions for future research on the topic of youth
participation that may include countries outside Europe which will allow a superior
and more sustainable comparison to be made; as well as include older people in order
determinant.
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Formal Informal
General Political
Variables Political Political
Participation
Participation Participation
*p<0.05 **p<0.01
Political Participation (with “newdemocracy” variable
Formal Informal
General Political
Variables Political Political
Participation
Participation Participation
*p<0.05 **p<0.01