Politicisation between State-centred, Market-centred and Lifestyle-Centred Changes in Climate Strike Participants: / Climate Strike Participants and the Politicisation of Lifestyle-Centred Changes

While Fridays For Future is not merely a youth-driven endeavour, it has been strongly influenced by a young generation who has claimed their right for a future. In this article, we look at generational specificities, changing values and how these translate into the engagement of protesters. Focusing on participants in the global climate strikes, we address how generational aspects influence the framing of the causes and the solutions for climate change. In doing this, we rely on protest surveys fielded in several European cities during two global climate strikes. Specifically, from a social movement approach, and considering individual sociodemographic features, past records of activism and political values, we look at the intersection of street protests and lifestyle transformations. As the very young people are at the core of protests, we pay particular attention to generational specificities with the expectation that innovative prefigurative forms might be more central for the younger cohorts. Taking insights from the literature on political participation, we also consider political trust, political efficacy, past records of participation in protests and political self-placement as potentially relevant explanatory variables; we expect that a stronger focus on lifestyle activism could decrease institutional trust and efficacy as well as lower degrees of experience with protest activities. Furthermore, we consider the effectiveness of the attitudinal-behavioural relation, analysing if and how trust in individual lifestyles’ efficacy corresponds to real changes in personal behaviours. Finally, we also take into account eventual changes in the proposed solutions that took place between the March and the September 2019 strikes, testing whether politicisation of the participation in climate mobilisation might be due to the learning processes that develop as social mobilisation unfolds. All in all, these aspects bear important implications for young people’s political participation and democratic engagement.