Millennials’ disengagement from institutionalized politics has been a cause for concern among scholars and pundits. Consequently, there is an increased interest in possibilities to mobilize them through new participatory mechanisms, but the results are still unclear. We contribute to this research agenda by examining whether the Finnish citizens’ initiative mobilized the millennial generation with data from the Finnish National Election Survey from 2015 (FNES2015). Furthermore, we use the civic voluntarism model (CVM) to explore what factors explain the involvement of millennials in supporting citizens’ initiatives to determine whether users differ from non-users and whether CVM works differently for millennials as compared to the general population. Our results show that millennials are frequent users of the initiative. We find few significant differences between millennial users and non-users, suggesting that using the citizens’ initiative is egalitarian among millennials. We also find no evidence that the CVM model works differently for millennials.

The Fridays for Future (FFF) movement is a major climate movement on a global scale, calling for systemic change and demanding politicians act on their responsibilities. In this paper, we present and analyze original findings from a case study on the FFF movement in Finland, at a watershed moment for young climate activism. We explore the representations of young people’s environmental citizenship within the framings of the FFF movement, using an environ-mental citizenship framework analysis of the Finnish news media and Twitter discussions. We identified three frames within the media debate on the school strikes: the sustainable lifestyle frame, which focuses on the individual aspects of environmental citizenship, the active youth frame, which focuses on justifications of youth participation in politics, and the school attendance frame, which is concerned about the young people’s strike action. Our results explore the many aspects of environmental citizenship that young people express in the FFF movement. We reflect on the dominance of adult voices in the framing of this historic movement of young people for action on climate change. Our analysis contributes to a step change in the study of this important global movement, which is shaping the emergence of young people as active citizens in Finland and around the world. We argue that the FFF movement is shaping young people’s perceptions of active citizenship, and we advocate a youth-centred focus on the collective action and justice demands of young people.

Young people’s lack of participation in elections has been taken as a sign that the young are wary of representative democracy and reject traditional authorities. Instead of election participation, it is expected that the young want more possibilities for direct involvement in political decision-making. Fridays for Future (FFF) is a global, youth-led climate movement that has been able to mobilize millions of young people around the world into political action (de Moor et al., 2020; Wahlström et al., 2019) in times when youth participation is generally declining, especially in traditional forms of political participation. While many have taken this as evidence that young people dismiss representative democracy in favor of a more participatory democracy, in-depth studies of their motivations are still lacking. This article helps fill this lacuna by providing a case study on Finnish FFF participants. Through semi-structured interviews and theory-guided content analysis with 15- to 20-year-old climate activists, the Finnish FFF participants’ attitudes toward political participation are examined. The data consists of 11 one-on-one in-depth theme interviews with young people, who participated in the FFF movement by attending at least one protest in Finland in 2019. The interviews focused on the following themes: motivation for participation in the FFF movement, interviewee’s background, and the participant’s ideas regarding politics, democracy, and political participation. The interviews were combined with material from various news sources to contextualize the information in the analysis phase. Based on the empirical evidence, I argue that although these young citizens have become politically active in a climate protest movement, it does not necessarily mean that they want major reforms to the representative democracy toward a more participatory system. Instead of more participatory possibilities, the Finnish climate activists want a better-functioning representative system with politicians who listen to their demands.

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keskustelua unga, demokrati och politiskt deltagandeFyra perspektiv på yngre medborgares demokratiska engagemang i Finland Lectio praecursoria Janet te Hut tunenBåde politiker och forskare har visat betydande oro över ungas politiska deltagande. Oron baserar sig på flera långvariga trender. Det är uppenbart att ungas deltagande i institutionaliserade former av politiskt engagemang har minskat i många demokratier över tid (Grasso m.fl. 2018). Unga röstar mindre än äldre människor och de är inte heller lika ivriga i att gå med i politiska partier.Unga människors lägre deltagande i demokratiska institutioner, det vill säga de som vi ofta kallar traditionella och institutionaliserade formerna av politiskt deltagande, ses som ett problem. Trenden kring ungas lägre deltagande har skapat oro över unga människors anknytning till och stöd för demokrati, eftersom representativ demokrati bygger på medborgardeltagande. Val är ett avgörande element i vårt representativa demokratiska system och därför ses nedgången i röstningsfrekvensen som särskilt negativ för samhällets demokratiska funktion.Förutom ungas politiska deltagande så har också ungas demokratiattityder väckt oro. På basen av oroväckande forskningsresultat har yngre generationer, särskilt "millennials", redan i årtal kallats "odemokratiska" och antagandet är att yngre generationer anser demokrati som mindre viktigt än äldre generationer gör (Foa och Mounk 2016; 2017). Även om dessa påståenden har ifrågasätts i olika forskningsprojekt (Alexander och Welzel 2017; Norris 2017; Voeten 2017), fortsätter påståendena att få stor uppmärksamhet i media även idag, särskilt i USA. Om yngre generationer stöder demokratin i mindre grad än tidigare, om de inte längre tror på demokratiska värderingar, om de attraheras av auktoritära alternativ och röstar på anti-etablissemangspartier och kandidater -kan deras attityder utgöra ett hot mot den liberala demokratin. Om yngre generationer systematiskt är mer öppna för odemokratiska styrelseformer kan det leda till att stödet för demokrati som styrelseform minskar allvarligt.Mitt ursprungliga intresse i forskningstemat "unga, demokrati och politiskt deltagande" uppstod ur ett praktiskt behov som var kopplad till den här oron och de tydliga nedåtgående trenderna i ungas valdeltagande. Jag arbetade i ett politiskt ungdomsförbund och där såg vi i praktiken det som forskning och statistiken visar: att unga var mindre benägna att delta i politiska organisationer och ta sig till valurnorna. Mitt jobb bestod i att komma på lösningar till hur unga människor kunde mobiliseras och rekryteras till vår organisation. Som studerande i statsvetenskaper vände jag mig till litteraturen. Vad som började som ett praktiskt intresse, förvandlades senare till en teoretisk fascination efter att jag bekantade mig med bland annat Russel J. Daltons (2008;) och Ronald Ingleharts (19771997) teorier om samhällelig förändring och ungas deltagande.På den fascinationen har jag också byggt min doktorsavhandling "Young people, democracy and political participation. Fo...