Youth in South America: Unwanted Citizens?

How do young citizens perceive political legitimacy and how does it affect their political behavior in less institutional way? Historically, “the good citizen” is the one who pays his taxes, votes and follows the laws. In this context, the civil disobedience of young people is usually viewed as a marginalization of the system. However, an agreement in political science is that the patterns of citizenship have been changing and a new citizenship’s conceptions have emerged, particularly among young people. Social psychology also proposed that political behavior of young people can be a necessity of visibility and desire to be part of the decision-making process. Existing research from sociology or political science has often focused on new patterns of electoral behavior within the framework of institutional participation. But in order to go further, the aim of this Paper is to measure the relationship between young’s, between 18 and 24 years old, subjective representations of citizenship and the new forms of political participation. The Paper will be at the crossroad of social psychology and political science theory. In doing so, a comparative and longitudinal analysis will be carried out focused in three South American countries that have been characterized by an increase in the new forms of participation since the recovered democracy in the 1990 to date: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Data will be obtained from World Values Survey, Latinobarómetro Survey and National Youth Surveys. Univariate and multivariate analysis will be applied. The first results show that the societies of the three countries are more critical today than in the 90’s, with a little confidence in the nation's major institutions. However, the data also shows that support for the democratic system, between young people, is stronger today than in the 90’s. In Chile, democracy support was particularly low in the beginning of the democratic regime and now it has become an issue of interest to the youth with a significant increase in support for democratic values. This apparent contradiction is explained by the fact that supporting democracy it is not the same as supporting the implementation of democracy. In Argentina and Chile we even observed an increase of young people who think that their country is not at all democratic and a decrease of young people who think that their country is completely democratic. These changes in subjective representations of citizenship between young people, explain an increasing of new forms of participation in moderate or violent illegal forms. This Paper argues that subjective representations of citizenship have an effect in the forms of new forms of participation evolution in the three countries.