Not ‘one of us’: understanding how non-engaged youth feel about politics and political leadership

The modern election campaign is a well-oiled machine. Campaigns are won by the smallest of margins. Strategists provide incentives for specific market segments, and potential voters are identified well before the writ is dropped. However, few questions are asked in those same war rooms when certain groups stay home – namely young people. Young people are largely ignored at election time, and in turn, those under 30 ignore elections. Drawing on 20 focus groups conducted in Canada in 2014, this paper compares politically engaged and less engaged communities of young people to learn how they feel about politics and political leaders. This effort builds a better understanding of why some communities of young people are less interested and engaged in politics which is vital to our understanding of turnout decline among youth, as it is these communities of young people who have almost entirely tuned out of political affairs.     

Youth political involvement update: measuring the role of cause-oriented political interest in young people's activism

In recent decades, a series of transformations have occurred that have changed young people's relationships with politics. In most Western countries, young people vote less and protest more. Survey research has detected this two-fold process in participation behaviour, but has failed to detect this same process in the field of political attitudes. In particular, the emergence of a specific dimension of psychological political involvement with a special impact on youth has gone unnoticed in survey-based research. Based on some recent qualitative studies, this research tries to identify and measure a specific dimension of interest in politics using a new question in a survey carried out in Catalonia in 2011. An interest directly oriented to political issues and causes – particularly those relevant in young people's everyday lives – is identified. The article also evaluates how traditional survey indicators of political involvement do capture, or not, this particular dimension of interest in politics. Finally, the new cause-oriented interest indicator is tested to analyse its impact on different types of participation in order to better understand patterns of activism in young people.     

The Disconnection In Online Politics: the youth political web sphere and US election sites, 2002-2004

In recent years, candidates and other political actors have dramatically increased their presence and activities online. Although the notion of these activities reaching beyond a limited set of early-adopters is relatively new, younger citizens have long been at the forefront of new developments on the web and continue to make up a substantial proportion of those seeking political information online. Given longstanding concern over levels of civic and political engagement among young people, questions concerning what young people seeking information and opportunities for political involvement online might find there are particularly relevant. In particular, we explore political websites that are directly targeted at younger voters (e.g. Rock the Vote and similar sites), websites produced by candidates and political parties, and possible linkages between these two web spheres. Based on content and hyperlink analyses spanning the 2002 and 2004 US election cycles, we find a complex evolution of the online political information environment offered to youth. Although the youth engagement web sphere experienced dramatic growth during this time period, our data also identify a reluctance of many mainstream political actors to speak directly to young people through the web, and a surprising underdevelopment of linkages between youth politics websites and the wider web of political information online. We conclude by considering the implications of these patterns for future research on the role of new media in processes of political communication and engagement.     

‘The outraged young’: young Europeans,civic engagement and the new media in a time of crisis

Public involvement in traditional political institutions has declined significantly over the past few decades, leading to what some have seen as a crisis in citizenship. This trend is most striking amongst young people, who have become increasingly alienated from mainstream electoral politics in Europe. Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence to show that younger citizens are not apathetic about ‘politics’ – they have their own views and engage in democracy in a wide variety of ways that seem relevant to their everyday lives. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, young Europeans have borne the brunt of austerity in public spending: from spiralling youth unemployment, to cuts in youth services, to increased university tuition fees. In this context, the rise and proliferation of youth protest in Europe is hardly surprising. Indeed, youth activism has become a major feature of the European political landscape: from mass demonstrations of the ‘outraged young’ against political corruption and youth unemployment, to the Occupy movement against the excesses of global capitalism, to the emergence of new political parties. This article examines the role that the new media has played in the development of these protest movements across the continent. It argues that ‘digitally networked action’ has enabled a ‘quickening’ of youth participation – an intensification of political participation amongst young, highly educated citizens in search of a mouthpiece for their ‘indignation’.     

The Rules of (Dis)engagement: Black Youth and Their Strategies for Navigating Police Contact

Prior work on youth–police relations examines young people's general perceptions of the police, their differential treatment by police officers, and officers' discretion in dealing with youth. Yet researchers have largely neglected the question of how young people attempt to shape these encounters. I address this critical gap, while also incorporating the experiences of “on track” youth and young women—two groups that are not exempt from police contact but traditionally ignored in the youth–police literature. Drawing on semistructured group and individual interviews with 19 black young people in New York City, I investigate the strategies they employ or subscribe to in navigating police contact. Three types of strategies emerged from my analysis: avoidance, management, and symbolic resistance. Avoidance strategies are marked by young people's attempts to preemptively steer clear of officers on the street. Management strategies are employed by young people during police encounters to limit risk or harm, while symbolic resistance is a subtle tactic used by some youth to preserve their dignity in these interactions. This study also considers the gender differences in respondents' approaches and offers new insights into how they assess their police interactions in an era of highly publicized incidents of police brutality.     

The politics of global youth participation

This article critically examines increased opportunities for youth participation in global political affairs created by the United Nations and its member states in the 2010s. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews at three global youth conferences, this study demonstrates the operationalization of participatory governance, a current mode of global politics, that seeks to engage multi-stakeholders in a seemingly more democratic and egalitarian process. It investigates how the structure and culture of participation mechanisms found in international political processes limited youth engagement. Young people expressed both dissatisfaction with what they perceived to be their inability to participate meaningfully and their desire to fulfill their human right to participation. The author argues that this reflects the construction an ideal global youth-citizen today as marked by an individual’s exercise of compulsory participation as a self-governing and responsible subject. Participation is employed as a mode of governance so that young people may instrumentally advance thier life chances against the insecurities of social risks imposed on them in the retreat of state provisions. The study underscores the need to critically examine the institutionalization of political youth agency.     

Age group differences in political activism in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

There is a dearth of studies on age-related patterns of political activism in Malaysia, specifically on young people’s patterns of political participation relative to their elders, and in relation to the rich literature that has developed in Western democracies. By analysing survey data from Wave 6 (2010–2014) of the World Values Surveys (WVS), this study aims to investigate the differences in political engagement between younger and older people in Malaysia, including new repertoires outside the mainstream politics, by addressing the question of whether young Malaysians are more active in political activities compared to older groups. The findings conform to the expected patterns in the literature that young people are less likely to participate in conventional political activities than their respective elders. However, we find no significant differences for unconventional political participation. The study further shows that demographic indicators such as the levels of education, gender and ethnic group belonging do not appear to be linked to the age gap between youth and their elders in political activism. As such, the study provides evidence that young people in Malaysia are less likely to be politically active than their elders and that this is not clearly attributable to the socio-demographic factors analysed.     

Youth,activism, and social movements

There has been considerable debate over the extent and role of young people's political participation. Whether considering popular hand‐wringing over concerns about declines in young people's institutional political participation or dismissals of young people's use of online activism, many frame youth engagement through a “youth deficit” model that assumes that adults need to politically socialize young people. However, others argue that young people are politically active and actively involved in their own political socialization, which is evident when examining youth participation in protest, participatory politics, and other forms of noninstitutionalized political participation. Moreover, social movement scholars have long documented the importance of youth to major social movements. In this article, we bring far flung literatures about youth activism together to review work on campus activism; young people's political socialization, their involvement in social movement organizations, their choice of tactics; and the context in which youth activism takes place. This context includes the growth of movement societies, the rise of fan activism, and pervasive Internet use. We argue that social movement scholars have already created important concepts (e.g., biographical availability) and questions (e.g., biographical consequences of activism) from studying young people and urge additional future research.     

The literary development of Yekhiel Shraybman: a Jewish writer in Soviet clothing

This article examines the literary career of the last Bessarabian Yiddish writer of his generation Yekhiel Shraybman (1913–2005). His loss is still deeply felt by the Moldovan Jewish community as his life and writings embraced the country’s historic Jewish past. As his literary career was launched and developed in the Soviet Union his work, aesthetics and politics were affected by “Sovietisation,” a requirement of the Communist Party’s standards in relation to literature. Yet behind the ambivalent glamour of the title “Soviet writer,” he managed to remain a Jewish writer and leave behind a printed memory of his home shtetl, Rashkov.     

Integration through Distinction: German‐Jewish Immigrants,the Legal Profession and Patterns of Bourgeois Culture in British‐ruled Jewish Palestine1

Abstract This article examines the encounter of the German Jewish immigrants with the crystallizing of local Jewish community in British‐ruled Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that their accepted image as cultural aliens, based on their allegedly incompatible European‐like bourgeois life‐style, was propagated by both parties in this encounter, causing their marginalization and at the same time serving them as an important socio‐cultural resource. Focusing on the field of the legal profession, it analyses the 1930's and the already emerging and highly‐accepted patterns of a local middle‐class civic culture (despite its rejection by the political discourse), which facilitated the advancement of an elite group of German‐born lawyers in this field.     

Young people’s leisure patterns: testing social age,social gender,and linguistic capital hypotheses

We analysed young people’s leisure activities in order to identify their leisure habitus, discover how they combined activities into leisure patterns, and examine how leisure patterns were socially structured. We argue that the effects of age, gender, and language on how young people’s leisure patterns are structured are mediated by social class. We found that leisure practices could be classified in terms of three habitus: the frequent leisure habitus, the cultural activity habitus, and the social vs. entertainment habitus. The different combinations of these three leisure habitus by young people resulted in four patterns which we refer to as social, omnivorous, entertainment, and religious leisure patterns. The association of leisure patterns with indicators of social position suggests that, as predicted by our theoretical framework, age, gender, and language effects are diminished once we take into account the mediating role of social class. Young people’s leisure practices are therefore socially differentiated, with young immigrants forming a vulnerable group that should be the particular focus of youth leisure policies.     

Max Weinreich,assimilation and the social politics of Jewish nation-building

Through an analysis of the methodological and theoretical writings of Max Weinreich that were devoted to the inter-war Jewish youth research programme at the Jewish Scientific Institute (YIVO), this article discusses the ideological and political assumptions that lay behind this scientific project. Deconstructing the main research categories of the project, the author presents ways in which Weinreich and his associates constructed the Jewish nation and its place in the new inter-war political and social reality. This reality was seen in a complex manner, as a simultaneous chance for Jewish modernisation, upward mobility, productivisation, and as a response to the threat of modern state institutions that were introducing discriminatory policies, and, most importantly, assimilation. The last process was seen as the biggest danger, which could fragment and finally even dissolve the essentialist, secular and national model of Jewish community as envisioned by Max Weinreich and YIVO. The author shows how the essentialist vision of the nation omnipotent in inter-war Poland (among both Polish and Jewish communities) introduced unresolved tension between the need for social and cultural integration of the Jews, which was important for Weinreich and his circle, and the simultaneous aim of building a culturally and politically coherent Jewish nation. Further discussion shows how this kind of perception of social reality transformed a scientific research project into a kind of social intervention and nation-building programme, comparable to the ideologies of Jewish national secularist political parties. While presenting itself as a universal, national institution and addressing its call to all Jewish youth, YIVO promoted a particular political view of the Jewish nation and its tradition, history and religion. By engaging Jewish youth in a research programme devoted to its “personality,” one of the hidden aims of the project was to influence the political and social consciousness of Eastern Europe's Jewish youth.     

Jews in Belorussia's judicial system, 1944–1953

The relationship and cultural transfer between Jews and Belorussians are still rather unexplored topics. This article aims at analysing a historical process neglected by the historians of both the Jewish people and the Soviet Union: the “Belorussianisation” of the Jewish people in the interwar period. It proposes to scrutinise the impact of the nationalities policy on the crystallisation of a Belorussian‐Jewish identity. On the one hand, it is obvious that Belorussian leading political figures, influenced by Jewish intellectuals, proved to be very favourable to the development of the Jewish culture and to a Jewish‐Belorussian rapprochement. On the other hand, this study suggests that the achievements of the Soviet nationalities policy with regard to the “Belorussianisation” of Jews were ambiguous. In the three fields studied – education, scholarship and art – the results appeared to be mitigated and paradoxical. The “indigenisation” policy led to a separation of the Jewish and Belorussian educational system but stimulated the flourishing of a joined Belorussian‐Jewish scholarship. In contrast, the most profound and fruitful encounter between the Jewish and Belorussian cultures occurred in a domain, the visual arts, where the Belorussian government did not set a clear policy of rapprochement.     

‘We don’t have any limits’: Russian young adult life narratives through a social generations lens

A social generation framework attends to how emergent historical patterns of social organization shape young adult contemporaries, noting shared strategies to constructing subjectivity within a common political, social, and economic milieu. However, the perspective has given scant attention to how young people engage in reflexive life management outside of well-documented Western contexts. Additionally, the framework needs further consideration of how youth lives are shaped by the social relations of globalization. To address these omissions, this article examines how educated, urban Russian young adults engage in reflexive life management. In drawing on a social generations rather than transitions approach, youth meaning-making is analyzed through grounded analysis rather than reliance on previously conceived categories. The study of youth reflexive life management can be reframed as a question: ‘what does making a life mean to educated urban post-adolescents in Russia?’ We explore how respondents interpret difference and inequality through transnational comparisons, center globality in the biographical project, and encounter citizenship constraints. We focus on three meaning-making projects: idealized globality, assuming nonlinear paths, and vigilant evaluative work.     

Comparing transition expectations of young people with moderate learning disabilities with other vulnerable youth and with their non-disabled counterparts

This article uses data obtained from a study that examined transition experiences of young people with moderate learning disabilities. A comparison is made between those experiences and the experiences of both other vulnerable young people and non-disabled youth. It was found that non-disabled youth experience extended transitions with events that signify adult status taking place well into young people's 20s. On the other hand, vulnerable youth transitions are often (out of necessity) rushed, with young people having to take on responsibility beyond their years. The results of the study demonstrate that for young people with moderate learning disabilities the experiences of transition more closely mirror those of other vulnerable youth than they do the non-disabled population.     

‘They are harsher to me than to my friend who is blonde’. Police critique among ethnic minority youth in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Young people belonging to categories and living in areas that are targeted by the police find more arguments for detailed police critique than others. When they narrate their assessments there is a series of experiential references being made, which can be used to sort out their police critique. This article draws on 20 interviews with ethnic minority youth in so-called vulnerable neighborhoods in Sweden. It shows how young people portray the police as sometimes profiling and racist, sometimes just and legitimate, and how they do so by comparisons and identifications. Comparisons within Sweden and identifications with police targets tend to result in more negative assessments whereas comparisons with countries of origin and identifications with non-targeted categories may result in more positive or mixed assessments. These young people also evaluate the police with reference to the stigmatization of their neighborhoods. To be stopped because you are associated with a residential area is described as deeply unfair, even if the police are polite, and observations of how the police change behavior in different areas promote critique. Our findings point to the importance of extending a criteria-based model of how today’s young people assess the police with a more social and ethnographic understanding.     

Lectures,murder, and a phony terrorist: managing “Jewish power and danger” in 1960s communist Czechoslovakia

The Slánský Affair of 1952 introduced a specific matrix of ideas about Jewish power and the danger that Jews posed to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. These ideas, with roots in earlier discourses, conditioned Jewish–state relations for decades, providing party-state officials and even Jewish functionaries with a language for articulating demands of the government and a framework for understanding the place of Jewish citizens in the socialist nation. Inter- and intra-ministerial conflicts reveal that differences in purview and philosophy often led officials to prioritise different aspects of the Jewish power–danger matrix. The paternalistic responsibility to protect domestic Jewry from the negative influences of foreign “Zionists” frequently clashed with the objective of appeasing Western Jewry, whose influence in the US Czechoslovak communists overestimated. While the latter consideration – and others – often moved the Ministry of Culture to advocate in favour of the Czechoslovak Jewish communities, the former concern – taken remarkably seriously – led the secret police to oppose them at every turn, often in the most conspiratorial of ways. To that end, this article introduces new information and perspective on the murder of Charles Jordan in 1967 and its repercussions and political uses in the years that followed.     

Contradictory tendencies in the political culture of Croatian youth: unexpected anomalies or an expected answer to the social crisis?

A successful democratic consolidation of post-socialist societies depends, among other things, on their citizens’ political culture, younger generations included. Moreover, youth civic engagement today and in the future is a guarantee of the continuity and development of democracy, which means that scientists need to gain insight into young people’s political culture. In this paper we look at political values, institutional trust and participation as relevant components of the civic political culture. The analysis is based on quantitative data collected in the empirical studies of Croatian youth, carried out between 1999 and 2013. Based on longitudinal study results, a downward trend is identified regarding selected political culture indicators: acceptance of liberal-democratic values, trust in social and political institutions, interest in politics and party preference. However, there is a simultaneous increase in participation in various types of organizations, especially political parties. The interpretation of established tendencies is placed in a broader context of an inherited democratic deficit, economic recession and social crisis. Current trends are both indicators and consequences of young people’s inadequate political socialization as well as weaknesses of political institutions and various actors during the transition and consolidation period.     

Australian young people's participatory practices and internet use

This paper examines the relationship between Internet use and political participation among Australian young people. Based on original survey data it demonstrates that there clearly exists a 'digital divide' amongst 18-34-year-old Australians, which is delineated on demographic characteristics of geography, education level, income level and occupational classification. While the Internet has far from replaced the traditional information sources of television and newspapers, it does, however, facilitate participation undertaken by already politically engaged young people. The Internet has fundamental importance in facilitating information sharing and organizing for young people involved in activist and community groups. The paper also provides case studies of two non-government, youth-oriented organizations with participatory Internet sites (Vibewire Youth Services and Inspire Foundation) to further explore the potential of Internet enhancement of young people's autonomous political spaces. One site provides Internet-only, youth-specific mental health services and has developed a portal for active community-based participation. It has won commendations for encouraging youth ownership of service provision and providing space for youth participation. The other site provides discussion and journalism for and by young people on a range of cultural, social and political issues. This site also engages in mainstream political issues through 'electiontracker', which provided four young people with the opportunity to join the mainstream media in following and reporting on the 2004 Australian federal election campaign. The focus in this paper on heterogenous acts of participation is able to expand our understanding of the democratizing potential of young people's Internet-based political practices.     

Young people,future hopes and concerns in Finland and the European Union: classed and gendered expectations in policy documents

In this article, I examine the ways in which governing bodies at the Finnish national and also European Union levels talk about young people and our shared future in Finland. I use their youth policy documents as material for critical discourse analysis. My argument is that, besides presenting visions of a desired future, these papers also produce and reproduce divisions between young people that reflect gender and class positions. Young people are divided into those who have potential, those who will take care of others’ needs, and those who are at risk of marginalisation. I also argue that the Nordic policy tendency to conceive of youth as a resource rather than as a problem is not consistent. Finnish youth policy has changed, firstly because of the changing economic environment – the politics of austerity – and secondly because of Europeanisation.