Young Party Members and Their Future

Abstract

In Chapter 7, we have seen how young party members view the ‘crisis of democracy’ faced by their political systems, how they analyse their causes and symptoms, and how some of them intend and expect to make a real significant difference in the life of their contemporaries and of their nations over the coming decades. They want to re-emphasise policy areas that citizens care about but which, in their opinions, have been overlooked by political parties and incumbent politicians. They believe that they can streamline representation, improve the sense of efficacy of their contemporaries, and rejuvenate the entire world of politics and representative democracy in Europe. However, we have also confirmed that to a certain extent, young party members continue to fuel a certain derivation of representative democracy towards a professionalisation of politics. At the same time, young party members are rather straightforward in their interpretation of what is wrong with current politics and are enthusiastic with regard to their willingness to change the way politics and representation are organised across our countries, but that they are not necessarily in a position to formulate very specific solutions to the ills of European democracies, let alone agree on such a common solution as a ‘new generation’ of politically involved citizens. Last but not least, we have seen that in the context of the re-invention of contemporary Western democracy, young party members differ very significantly along the three prototypes of young activists that we have identified in Chapter 2: moral-minded, social-minded, and professional-minded.