Reasons behind Changes in Youth Participation in European Societies: The Power of Institutions or the Power of New Generations?

The paper aims to contribute to citizenship studies, by measuring the distance between the level of participation of young people and adults within the European societies. To explore the sources of active participation among young people, it is important to see more clearly how big is the gap between young people and adults and what are the most striking aspects of the difference? How do contextual factors (political structures, processes and debates) influence young people’s political participation? Beyond showing the European trends the paper focuses on two different cases based on clear differences on participatory incentives of political institutions towards citizens. The case of Switzerland is interesting from this aspect because arenas for youth involvement in political life are numerous. As a contrast Hungary, a ’new’ EU member state is selected where civic participation is low even as compared to other post-communist countries. Studying most dissimilar cases helps to reveal whether differences in the opportunity structures in the two countries conclude in different youth participation patterns and youth-adult citizenship patterns – or just the contrary despite the structural differences the youth-adult distances stick. The analysis brings evidence to the differences in political participation and detects different reasons (e.g. institutional reasons, value patterns, democraphic variables as gender or educational background, etc.) behind them. In order to detect these differences and to elaborate the comparative perspective on youth participation in conventional and non-conventional forms and to control for longitudinal variables concerning political interest, trust, electoral and other forms of participation, party allegiance, the paper analyses the six datasets (2002-2012) of European Social Survey. The paper may give feedback to citizenship studies to discover possible barriers that stand in the way of youth participation.