How do young Europeans respond to threats to democracy?

There is increasing attention paid to how citizens respond to threats to democracy and what this means for their norms of good citizenship and civic values. These contributions engage directly with both the perils and promise of liberal democracy, often underlining an urgent need to revisit the relationship between norms of good citizenship, political behaviour, and senses of belonging. However, we seem to know little about how young people's citizenship and conceptions of their role as good citizens change in both liberal and, in the case of Europe at least increasingly illiberal and conservative contexts. This is an equally urgent, if not an even more pressing issue, if we are to consider that young people define the future of both citizenship and democracy. Against this backdrop, this paper builds a model of ‘good’ European citizenship among young people, applying structural equation modelling to the European segment of the 2022 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study dataset via R. Specifically, the paper examines the relationship between the different norms of young people’s good citizenship, including duty-based, engaged, and passive norms, senses of European belonging, and preferred avenues for political engagement in the light of their gender-based attitudes (e.g. support for equality based on gender). Examining how young people conceive of ‘good’ citizenship and express themselves through civic and political engagement in this way will have important implications for current debates about the outlook of democratic citizenship in Europe going forward.