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Abstract:In this paper I analyze the role of subjective well-being in unemployed and employed youth political participation. Research shows that life satisfaction increases participation in voting, but has no effect on protest activities when looking at the overall population. However, in the case of youth, life dissatisfaction fosters the potential for protest activities. Since unemployment is detrimental for the subjective well-being of individuals, especially when long-lasting, I ask whether the reduced subjective well-being of long-term unemployed youth, their life dissatisfaction, fosters their participation in two forms of voice-based participation-contacting and protest activities-that can be used to express their dissatisfaction. I find that life dissatisfaction fosters the participation of employed youth in contacting activities, but not that of unemployed youth. Quite on the contrary, for protest activities, it is life satisfaction that fosters participation of the unemployed youth.Keywords: youth; unemployment; life satisfaction; political participation

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This paper examines the relationships between employment status, social capital, and the participation of young people in different kinds of political activities such as contacting, consumer, and protest activities. We focus on the role of social capital for political participation, addressing three related questions: Do unemployed and employed youth display different levels of social capital and political participation? Does social capital favor the political participation of unemployed and employed youth? Is social capital more important for unemployed youth than for employed youth? To address these questions we compare long-term unemployed youth to regularly employed youth using original survey data. Our analysis suggests that the employment status has only a limited impact on political participation, affecting only consumer actions. In contrast, the social capital resulting from associational involvement is positively correlated to political participation. However, rather than countering the effect of exclusion from the labor market, it plays a similar role for unemployed youth and employed youth.

Protest event analysis is a key method to study social movements, allowing to systematically analyze protest events over time and space. However, the manual coding of protest events is time-consuming and resource intensive. Recently, advances in automated approaches offer opportunities to code multiple sources and create large data sets that span many countries and years. However, too often the procedures used are not discussed in details and, therefore, researchers have a limited capacity to assess the validity and reliability of the data. In addition, many researchers highlighted biases associated with the study of protest events that are reported in the news. In this study, we ask how social scientists can build on electronic news databases and computational tools to create reliable PEA data that cover a large number of countries over a long period of time. We provide a detailed description our semiautomated approach and we offer an extensive discussion of potential biases associated with the study of protest events identified in international news sources.