This book analyses the relationship between youth and participation, looking specifically at those repertories of involvement that are commonly clustered under the concept of “unconventional political participation”. The author focuses on the connections between youth practices of participation and youth conditions in contemporary society. Drawing from the analysis of three ethnographic case studies conducted on experiences of youth participation in Italy and Sweden, the circumstances and the reasons leading young people to express their political ideas through forms of engagement located outside the realm of “formal politics” are explored. The book seeks to bring back the specificities of contemporary youth at the centre of the analysis of youth practices of participation, highlighting their often overlooked socio-historical and generational ‘situatedness’. Youth and Unconventional Political Engagement will be of interest students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including youth studies, political science, and sociology.

What exactly is civic and political participation? What factors influence young people’s participation? How can we encourage youth to actively participate in their own democracies? Youth Civic and Political Engagement takes a multidisciplinary approach to answering these key questions, incorporating research in the fields of psychology, sociology, political science and education to explore the issues affecting youth civic and political engagement. Drawing on evidence that has been obtained in many different national contexts, and through multinational studies, this book provides a theoretical synthesis of this large and diverse body of research, using an integrative multi-level ecological model of youth engagement to do so. It identifies unresolved issues in the field and offers numerous suggestions for future research. Youth Civic and Political Engagement is an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers, youth workers, civil society activists, policymakers and politicians who wish to acquire an up-to-date understanding of the factors and processes that influence young people’s civic and political engagement, and how to promote youth engagement.

This book examines how young people understand and live politics, using innovative research methods. It treats age, class, gender and ethnicity as political 'lived experiences'. It concludes that young people are alienated, rather than apathetic, and that their interests and concerns are rarely addressed within mainstream political institutions.

In the last decades, political participation expanded continuously. This expansion includes activities as diverse as voting, tweeting, signing petitions, changing your social media profile, demonstrating, boycotting products, joining flash mobs, attending meetings, throwing seedbombs, and donating money. But if political participation is so diverse, how do we recognize participation when we see it? Despite the growing interest in new forms of citizen engagement in politics, there is virtually no systematic research investigating what these new and emerging forms of engagement look like, how prevalent they are in various societies, and how they fit within the broader structure of well-known participatory acts conceptually and empirically. The rapid spread of internet-based activities especially underlines the urgency to deal with such challenges. In this book, Yannis Theocharis and Jan W. van Deth put forward a systematic and unified approach to explore political participation and offer new conceptual and empirical tools with which to study it. Political Participation in a Changing World will assist both scholars and students of political behaviour to systematically study new forms of political participation without losing track of more conventional political activities.

This book is concerned with the contexts, nature and quality of the participation of young people in European democratic life. The authors understand democracy broadly as both institutional politics and civic cultures, and a wide range of methods are used to analyse and assess youth participation and attitudes.

In Forms of Collective Engagement in Youth Transitions, renowned and emerging sociologists analyse new phenomena of collectivity among young people around the globe.