Employment Status, Social Capital, and Political Participation: A Comparison of Unemployed and Employed Youth in Geneva

Abstract

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.

Youth, Precarious Employment and Political Participation in Hungary

“…The effect found through a cross-sectional analyses does not hold when one takes into account the temporal ordering of events (first being involved in a specific workplace setting, then participating politically). In terms of new forms of political participation, employment status has only a limited impact on political participation, affecting only consumer activities (Lorenzini and Giugni, 2012).…”

Civil Society and Political Participation: What Type of Political Participation is Influenced by Community Level Involvement in Civil Society?

“…This section outlines the theoretical arguments concerning the link between voluntary associations at the community level and individual political participation and the following section specifically addresses previous studies that are pertinent to the case of Sweden. Since Almond and Verba () first observed a positive correlation between individual participation in voluntary associations and political participation, this correlation has been empirically corroborated in numerous contexts (Lorenzini and Giugni ; Teorell ) . The two main causal mechanisms explaining the link between civil society and political participation presented in this section include one that emphasizes individual values and skills (schools of democracy) and a second one that emphasizes the importance of overlapping social networks.…”

Perceived economic self-sufficiency: a country- and generation-comparative approach

“…Examples of social capital are social relations such as friendships, trust relationships, business relationships or memberships in groups, organisations or professional associations (see Maloney and van Deth 2010;Christoforou 2011;Freitag and Kirchner 2011;Cemalcilar and Gökşen 2014). Social networks play a crucial role in the path to economic self-sufficiency (Lorenzini and Giugni 2012), as they influence the individual's perception of opportunities and thereby conditions, for example, an individual's decision to pursue self-employment (Davidsson and Honig 2003;Jagannathan et al 2017;Rapp et al 2018). The family's social capital is likely to influence a child's social capital, for s/he can also rely on the parents or relatives, friends and acquaintances when developing their own network of social relations.…”