Growing into participation? Influences on youth’s plans to engage socially or politically and their changes over time

Abstract

In the social sciences, adolescents’ interest in social and political issues and their participation has been a subject of controversy. While there is an ongoing public debate about young people’s lack of political engagement, many social and political processes depend on participation. For this reason, we should consider whether and how young people get involved socially or politically and how important future participation is to them. In this study, we analysed whether young people in Vienna are politically or socially engaged and how different factors shape their aim of social and political participation for the future. Therefore, we used data from a five-wave panel study with young people in Vienna. At the beginning of the study period about 3000 respondents participated, the students were attending 8th grade at the Neue Mittelschule (the lower track of lower secondary school) in the 2017–2018 academic year and they were then surveyed annually over the next four years (2019–2022). For the analysis, we used cross-sectional data from the fourth wave (the survey year 2021) to explore the way in which young people considered their political and social engagement. In addition, we used longitudinal data from five waves of the panel survey (2018–2022) to determine how the subjective importance of social and political participation changes over time. Our results show that the different forms of social and political participation varied widely and, based on linear multilevel models with a repeated measurement design, we argue that while sociodemographic factors such as gender and social class are crucial for the youth’s social and political participation, engagement is also shaped by their family resources. In contrast to previous research findings, we found that the importance young people attach to engaging socially and politically decreases between the ages of 15 and 19 years. Our findings reveal new insights for achieving future social and political participation by young people.