Youth in Regime Crisis

Abstract

How do political regimes respond to the challenges emanating from youth mobilization? This book seeks to understand regime resilience and breakdown by analysing the public meaning of youth, as well as the physical mobilization of young people. Mobilization by young people is a key component in understanding the stabilization of the authoritarian regime structures in contemporary Russia, but the Russian experience makes sense only if placed in its broader historical context. Three comparative cases—the breakdown of the authoritarian Soviet Union, the breakdown of the democratic Weimar Republic, and the crisis of the democratic regime in France around 1968—highlight how regimes which lacked popular support have compensated for their insufficient legitimacy by trying to mobilize youth symbolically and politically. This book illustrates the symbolic significance of youth and its role in regime crisis by analysing a new dataset of newspaper articles with a new method of discourse analysis. The combination of qualitative interpretation and quantitative network analysis enables a deeper and more systematic understanding of discursive structures about youth. Through this methodological innovation the book contributes to the way we define the categories of youth, generation, and crisis. It makes the case that our conceptualization should reflect the way terms are being used—usages that can be captured in a systematic way with new methods of discourse analysis.