Our Future Environment

Youth will shape how the public engages in the future public sphere. Civic or political participation among the young is lower (11%) when compared to those 38 and older (~18%) (Jenkins, Andolina, Keeter, & Zukin, 2003). Civic participation in non-political groups is found to be more appealing to youth. Campbell, Galston, Niemi, and Rahn (2003) found that mandatory political participation decreases people’s internal motivation to participate. Theiss-Morse and Hibbing conclude that letting people know that becoming active in their favorite clubs does not fulfill their citizenship obligations. The route to enhancing meaningful civic life is not badgering people to become engaged because politics is fun and easy; but it may be that we should ask people to become engaged because politics is dreary and difficult.
There are two conflicting paradigms of youth civic engagement (Bennett, 2008). Young citizens, here discussed as 15-25, are viewed as either being active and engaged or passive and disengaged. Both paradigms foreground different core organizing values and principles, arguments and evidence of what constitutes civic engagement.
The active and engaged youth paradigm emphasizes generational changes in social identity that have resulted in the growing use and importance of peer networks and online communities (Bennett, 2008, 2). This paradigm typically emphasizes the power of youth as expressive individuals and finds fault in government performance and accessibility of institutions. Research in this area sometimes ignores the evidence that youth are poorly engaged in more conventional participation but largely engaged in consumer issues and localized volunteering.
The passive and disengaged paradigm reflects a different view of how a good citizen should interact in the public sphere. This paradigm does recognize the increase in autonomous forms of public expression and the desire among youth to have their voice heard. However, it worries about the privatization of the political sphere and emphasizes a focus on promoting public actions that directly interact with government and related social groups and institutions.
Overall these two paradigms point to a narrative of decline in youth engagement but each would interpret the following quote from Bennett differently:
“The narrative of decline overlooks creative developments, often led by youth,     that may be building the foundations of civil society in the 21st century….It treats     a withdrawal from major institutions (such as elections and the press) as a     decline, when these trends may actually reflect that youth are deliberately and     …choosing not to endorse forms of participation that are flawed.” (4).
The active and engaged paradigm would argue that more encouragement should be given to youth who demonstrate knowledge about online participation and a passion for how government or policy could be different. The passive and disengaged paradigm would say that unless youth are encouraged to refocus their interest on “off-line” and “traditional” forms of civic political participation then any chance of changing a flawed system is doomed to fail.
Bennett (2008), like Theiss-Morse & Hibbitt (2005), states that an important task is to “clarify the different assumptions about citizenship and engagement that underlie the often-competing views of the political and civic lives of youth”. These two paradigms, active and passive, have developed because of competing conceptualizations of citizenship. Young people are less willing than earlier generations to believe that citizenship is a matter of duty and obligation. There is a “broad, cross-national generational shift in the postindustrial democracies from a dutiful citizen model…to an actualizing citizen model…”(Bennett, 2008, 12).

Filed under: fostering identity on May 27th, 2008