Conflict orientation and young people – dimensions in adolescents’ engagement with political disagreement

Disagreement is an inevitable part of democratic societies and plays an important role in core elements of democracy such as public debate, freedom of speech and elections. Participation in democratic politics and society includes handling a diversity of opinions as well as engage in and withstand disagreement. However, research reveals that many citizens have a strained relationship with disagreement. On this backdrop, young citizens orientation toward disagreement becomes significant. Adolescence is often viewed as a prominent stage of political socialization. In addition, schools represent a heterogenous context well suited for young people to gain experience with disagreement. Therefore, experiences young people gain with disagreement and other political perspectives can be of particular importance for their current and future engagement with political discussions. This paper explores what characterizes adolescents’ engagement with political disagreements. Analyzing data from an original survey of 531 Norwegian 15-year-olds, the paper demonstrates disagreement orientation as multidimensional. More specifically, two distinct dimensions emerge as the strongest. The first is debate seeking, i.e., positive emotions such as feelings of joy when debating with opponents and actively participation in debates. The second is conflict avoidance, i.e., negative emotions such as discomfort and worries of social consequences. This is a novel finding. Previous research has set out that debate seeking and conflict avoidance would be different ending points of the same dimension of disagreement orientation. Even more, in this paper debate seeking and conflict avoidance emerge with distinct implication for aspects of youths’ political participation, such as their political interest. Therefore, the paper argues that there is a need for more attention to adolescents’ disagreement orientation as multidimensional and reflection on how this impacts on their political participation and political socialization, for instance in the political classroom.