The Gap Between Youth and Politics: Youngsters Outside the Regular School System Assessing the Conditions for Be(com)ing Political Subjects

Abstract

Approaches to youth engagement typically focus on withdrawal from conventional politics and participatory transformation. In this paper, we argue that such approaches fall short in grasping how groups with blended styles of relationship with politics assess their political ownership. This became apparent when, in the context of European elections, the rise of extreme right wing in Europe and intensification of austerity in Portugal, we discussed the circumstances framing youth’s relationship with politics with 40 youngsters outside regular school. Quantitative data from regular-school students on the same topic were used to trigger focus groups and later used by participants to interview their peers. Participants displayed ‘ordinary’ approaches to engagement, attributing an unexpected relevance to vote. Socioeducational disadvantages and self-blaming perspectives were actively contested, and the gap between youth and politics is to be filled by a normative equipment, with the school indicated as a fundamental, structured and unbiased locus of political education.

Youth Attitudes and Participation in Climate Protest: An International Cities Comparison Frontiers in Political Science Special Issue: Youth Activism in Environmental Politics

“…The broad topic of youth political participation has been subject to much research (Nie et al, 1974;Dalton, 2008;Jennings et al, 2009;Malafaia et al, 2021). These studies have highlighted the complex and nuanced way age intersects with cleavages of caste, class, gender, income, education, ethnicity and religious identification, voting habits and trust in institutions (Hazary,1988;Henn and Foard, 2014).…”

Democratic Citizenship-in-the-Making: Dis/Engagement Profiles of Portuguese Youth

“…Socialisation contexts, such as the school, can play an important role in scaffolding youth political agency by transforming the disengagement and passivity of the younger groups into democratic dispositions. As educational resources and political literacy continue to be pivotal for democratic engagement (Amadeo et al, 2002;Menezes et al, 2012;Malafaia et al, 2017), and given that younger citizens routinely claim to know little about how political world works (Malafaia et al, 2021;Sloam and Henn, 2019), it is important that school education promotes the conveyance and discussion of political issues. Indeed, the levels of cognitive disengagement are particularly problematic in the disengaged profile and, therefore, meaningful opportunities to engage civic and politically, supporting young students in building and widening their participatory experiences, should be promoted.…”

“…The reproduction of such labelling, however, produces worrying and long-term consequences that often mask other problems, such as the lack of responsiveness and political transparency in contemporary liberal democratic states (Amnå and Ekman, 2015;Henn et al, 2005). In parallel (and consequently) young people lose their trust in formal political processes and often also in themselves as politically competent citizens (Malafaia, Neves and Menezes, 2021;Norris, 2004). An analysis of a large cross-disciplinary corpus of published work aiming to understand how the concept of "active citizenship" is mobilised shows that, in political terms, youth is always described as "getting ready" but rarely as active citizens (Banaji, Mejias, Kouts, Piedade, Pavlopoulos, Tzankova, Mackova and Amnå, 2018).…”

“…On the one hand, the absence of observable acts of participation does not always equate with apathy and may not be a synonym of complete inaction (e.g., Schudson, 1996;Amnå and Ekman, 2015). On the other hand, the focus on spectacular forms of participation neglects "ordinary" approaches to engagement and prevents a nuanced understanding of the relationship between youth and politics (e.g., Malafaia, Neves and Menezes, 2021).…”

NEETs civic and political participation in outermost islands: The mediating roles of sense of community and agency

“…Structural factors also affect young people's participation, including a lack of opportunities to discuss and engage with social/political issues (Fernandes-Jesus, Ribeiro, Malafaia, Neves, Ferreira, & Menezes, 2015). Recent findings further demonstrate that school may be a highly significant and sometimes the only institutional leeway for creating conditions for political participation (Malafaia et al, 2021).…”