Germany's political system is, in large part, based on John Stuart Mill's (1958) idea of a representative democracy, which aims to involve people in policy-forming processes. However, the constitution of a parliamentary democracy fosters tendencies towards a professionalization of participation, which leads to a strong cleavage between elites and other citizens. Drawing on original, quantitative and qualitative, empirical data we seek to show that this political culture fosters the existence of two parallel worlds: one is characterized by statutory regulated forms of engagement and qualified members; the other is inhabited by young people who engage rather in self-organized projects and institutions distant from patterns of conventional political engagement. There is, moreover, relatively little mutual exchange between these two worlds, which potentially endangers the essence of democracy. In this article a typology of different forms of political engagement is developed in order to better explain such parallel worlds and their consequences.

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Summaries This article arises from interviews in 1996 and 1997 with 550 under‐30‐year‐old entrepreneurs in seven former communist countries, three in the Commonwealth of Independent States (Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine) and four in East‐Central Europe (Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). Some distinctive features of small businesses in all the ex‐communist countries are noted, and nine inter‐related differences between small businesses and their proprietors in the former Soviet Union and East‐Central Europe are then identified. On the basis of the evidence presented it is argued that growth alone is likely to result in East‐Central Europe's businesses being progressively Westernised, whereas a rather different type of capitalism is the more likely outcome in the former Soviet Union.

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The main question addressed in this paper is what happens when the usual sociological predictors (family background and educational attainment, for example) fail to predict labour market success and failure The paper presents evidence from surveys conducted in 1999 among 1300 25-26 year olds in Moscow, Vladikavkaz and Dneipropetrovsk which shows that this was indeed the situation in these places, and probably in most other parts of the former Soviet Union also. Our analysis also draws on evidence from focus groups conducted in Moscow and Dneipropetrovsk during 2002 with a total of 25 recent university graduates. All these young people were ‘succeeding’ according to the definition of success adopted in our analysis. It is argued that in the new market economies young people's prospects really have become unpredictable: that there are no efficacious but so far overlooked social or psychological variables. Young people's ways of coping with their chaotic conditions are identified: ‘keeping faith’ with customary reliabilities, off-setting risks, and endeavouring to de-couple their personal prospects from macro-realities. The paper concludes by evaluating competing explanations of the new unpredictability. It is argued that specifically post-Soviet economic trends and conditions in the 1990s are wholly responsible, and that, irrespective of whether the economies recover or remain depressed, the unpredictability of success will most likely be a short-term phenomenon.