A youth call for change? Cross-national evidence on protest attitudes among adolescents

Young people are often associated with protests as a form of political participation. In the West, young people have played a prominent role in the climate movement, while in the Global South, youths are often among the main participants of protests for democratic change. Some observers have viewed youths as the main catalyst for social change, while others have raised concerns over declining youth political participation. In this paper, I draw on survey data on adolescents across the globe to assess youths willingness to participate in peaceful protest and the factors explaining this variation at the individual and country level. I make use of data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016, which was implemented in over 20 countries in Europe, Latin-America, and the Asia-Pacific Region. I also include originally collected survey data from Lagos, Nigeria, on adolescents’ political opinions (2019). This allows for the inclusion of an African case in the overall dataset. Multilevel analyses are used to investigate the variation between youths in each country in terms of their willingness to participate in peaceful protest. I investigate whether levels of democracy, human rights records, and legacies of repression influence youths’ willingness. In addition, particular attention is devoted to differential relationships between individual determinants and intended participation due to contextual country factors.