Youth Politics and Citizenship

There is a variety of research focused on understanding youth political disengagement from formal politics, its causes, and possible remedies.

Proposals have including improving citizenship education in schools, lowering the voting age to 16, and introducing online petitioning. Research also finds the ways in which young people are engaging with politics is changing significantly, involving a mixture of online and offline repertoires, in extra-parliamentary arenas, with an increase in protests and ‘political consumerism’.

There are also sophisticated accounts of young people’s relationship with formal politics and how they react to feelings of exclusion and alienation from mainstream politics.

We aim to develop this research both in terms of analysing the ‘formal’ aspects of young people’s engagement (their perceptions of politicians, their representation in formal political institutions, etc.), and examining the more ‘informal’ changes in political repertoires towards ‘everyday’ engagement in a variety of arenas and through various new online and offline avenues of participation.

In particular, we are interested in the relationship between the formal and informal: how formal institutions can adapt to the new engagement repertoires of young people, so as to better include them within formal decision making processes.