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Between Indifference and Rejection of Politics: Mobilization of Youth in Post-contentious France
Abstract
This chapter takes stock of the scholarly puzzlement over recent protests in France. While some scholars have wondered whether the ‘contentious French’ (Tilly, 1986) are not that contentious anymore (Chabanet et al., 2018), recent mobilizations indicate a revival of street politics. We argue that France no longer fits its traditional portrait of an endemically contentious country. Our analysis shows that young people in France are characterized by consistently lower levels of political participation, notably when looking at disruptive forms. The rather comforting vision of a disputing, disaffected or dissatisfied, but engaged youth, constituting a force of change, requires to be revisited. However, our main findings also suggest that an emerging ‘post-contentious’ turning point does not necessarily amount to a broader process of acquiescence. The chapter concludes that French youths’ social exclusion seems to be extending itself in the form of a new type of political exclusion.
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Political participation has seen substantial changes in terms of both its structure and its scope. One of the most prominent venues of citizen engagement today is participation that relies on online means. Several approaches to online participation have attempted to understand its nature as a continuation of offline acts into the online realm, or as an independent form. In this article, we determine the place of online participation in the repertoire of political participation with greater precision. We ask whether, in particular, digitally networked participation (DNP) is an expansion of lifestyle politics, or whether there are empirical grounds to classify it as a new, independent mode of participation. We study a large variety of participatory activities using data from an online survey conducted among 2,114 politically active individuals in Belgium in 2017. We use an innovative measurement approach that combines closed-with open-ended questions, which allows us to explore new forms of participation that have previously not been considered or measured. Our results show that DNP is a core part of today's activists' repertoire and a distinct mode of political participation that is clearly attractive to younger, critical citizens.
The years following the 2008 global recession saw many liberal-democratic states respond to the economic crisis by introducing austerity policies. In turn, this provoked widespread dissent and social movement activism involving large numbers of young people. In response, governments of many different political persuasions moved to suppress these actions by criminalizing political dissent. The article inquiries into state and institutional moves to suppress social movement activism like the ‘Maple Spring’ student strikes in Quebec, Canada, and the Indignados movement in Spain. While Canada can be described as a ‘mature liberal-democracy’ and Spain might be better described as an ‘emergent liberal-democracy’, both criminalized young people exercising their democratic and constitutionally guaranteed rights to free expression and assembly by engaging in various forms of political protests. While some of this can be explained by reference to contradictions inherent in liberal democracies, we consider if it also reflects certain longstanding prejudices directed at young people. Young people have traditionally attracted disproportionate attention from police and legal systems when they are involved in ‘conventional’ criminal conduct. What role if any did the ‘youthful’ face of protest play in government moves to criminalize dissent in 2011-12? An account of the ‘civilizing offensive’ highlights the influence of ageist assumptions that ‘young people’ require close management. This provides some insight into state responses to young people’s engagement in politics when it goes beyond the conventional mode of ‘youth participation’ prescribed by states committed to managing electoral party politics.
Zusammenfassung
Seit Monaten steht Frankreich im Bann der Gelbwestenbewegung. Der Beitrag beschreibt zunächst das soziale, organisatorische und politische Profil der Bewegung, dann die von ihr hervorgerufenen Reaktionen. In einer stärker analytischen Perspektive widmet er sich drittens den Ursachen, Auslösern und Verstärkern der Bewegung, um abschließend deren Perspektiven einzuschätzen. Die Leitthese lautet, dass die Bewegung, obgleich doch ohne direkten Vorläufer in der Geschichte Frankreichs, ein Produkt der spezifischen sozio-ökonomischen, politischen und kulturellen Gegebenheiten des Landes ist. Sie wird deshalb auch kaum in anderen Ländern Fuß fassen. In ihrer jetzigen Form werden sich die Gelbwesten nicht halten können. In den kommenden Monates wird die Bewegung entweder in der Routine der Wiederholung allmählich versanden oder aber, und wahrscheinlicher, aufgrund einer Reihe interner Streitfragen (links oder rechts; friedlich oder militant; Bewegung oder Partei; moderate Reformen oder grundlegende politische Umwälzung) auseinander brechen.
Hit by the economic and political crisis, young people in Italy face increased labor precarity and the disillusionment derived from the disappearance of the radical Left from the parliamentary arena. In the Italian context, economic hardship, the decrease of resources available for collective action, and the weakened mobilizing capacity that traditional mass organizations (such as trade unions and political parties) retained in the first decade of the 2000s brought about a general decline in intensity and visibility of street protests, leading to an apparent retreat of activism to the local level of action. Although the crisis had a negative impact on collective action, evidence reveals that more creative and less visible forms of societal and political commitment were adopted by young generations in these years. This article explores how the Italian youth in times of crisis engaged actively in alternative and unconventional forms of political commitment aimed at re-appropriating space, free time, and access to leisure, mainly by means of mutualistic practices. Based on data from qualitative semistructured interviews with key informants and activists, this article sheds light on recreational activism, adopted as a political practice by the Italian youth active in counter-cultural spaces, nowadays at the forefront of the struggle to oppose the commodification of free time and leisure.
Set against a backdrop of austerity and neoliberal policies affecting many young people adversely, the Nuit Debout protest movement in France began in March 2016 when people gathered in public spaces to oppose the Socialist government's plan to introduce neoliberal labour legislation. Like other post-2008 movements, Nuit Debout was leaderless, non-hierarchical, and relied on social media for political communication and to mobilise participants. The Nuit Debout was also a movement inspired by powerful moral-political emotions such as righteous anger and hope. In this article, the authors address two questions. First, what features of Nuit Debout distinguished it from earlier social movements in France? Second, what role did moral emotions play in mobilising people to act as they did? Drawing on interviews with young protestors and their own testimonies, we argue that Nuit Debout was a distinctive form of protest for France. One distinguishing feature was the way young people-the "precarious generation"-were motivated by a strong sense of situated injustice, much of which related to what they saw as the unfairness of austerity policies, being deprived of a decent future and the feeling they had been betrayed by governments.
Open access link: https://doi.org/10.3390/soc8040100
Set against a backdrop of austerity and neoliberal policies affecting many young people adversely, the Nuit Debout protest movement in France began in March 2016 when people gathered in public spaces to oppose the Socialist government’s plan to introduce neoliberal labour legislation. Like other post-2008 movements, Nuit Debout was leaderless, non-hierarchical, and relied on social media for political communication and to mobilise participants. The Nuit Debout was also a movement inspired by powerful moral-political emotions such as righteous anger and hope. In this article, the authors address two questions. First, what features of Nuit Debout distinguished it from earlier social movements in France? Second, what role did moral emotions play in mobilising people to act as they did? Drawing on interviews with young protestors and their own testimonies, we argue that Nuit Debout was a distinctive form of protest for France. One distinguishing feature was the way young people—the “precarious generation”—were motivated by a strong sense of situated injustice, much of which related to what they saw as the unfairness of austerity policies, being deprived of a decent future and the feeling they had been betrayed by governments.
The present article analyzes the new culture of protest in Romania, a type of engagement we define as recreative activism. During the past years, young and culturally-inclined citizens started demanding more and more to have a share in the political process. To explain the novelty of this phenomenon, we argue that patterns of cultural consumption in the scene contributed to the spiral of ever-increasing participation in pro-tests throughout the past six years, mainly drawing on in-depth interviews with activists and adherents of the Romanian alternative scene. This data was further supplemented by inferences derived from participative ob-servation and content analysis. Three main protest waves were analyzed and critically put in context: the Rosia Montana (2013), Colectiv (2015), and OUG 13 (2017) protests. Our main findings are that recreative activism has its roots in the concomitance of cultural consump-tion and noninstitutionalized political participation, as well as in a certain disenchantment of protest partici-pants with post-communist politics. Further, recreative activism is characteristic for nonconventional political involvement, which requires less commitment than classic activism and is less influenced by ideologies.
The past few years have seen an unexpected resurgence of street-level protest movements around the world, from the rise of anti-austerity protests in Spain, Greece, and Israel to the global spread of the Occupy movement. This collection is designed to offer a comparative analysis of these movements, setting them in international, socioeconomic , and cross-cultural perspective in order to help us understand why movements emerge, what they do, how they spread, and how they fit into both local and worldwide historical contexts. As the most significant wave of mass protests in decades continues apace, Street Politics in the Age of Austerity: From the Indignados to Occupy offers an authoritative analysis that could not be more timely.
In this article we develop the notion of the technology-media-movement complex (TMMC) as a field-definition statement for ongoing inquiry into the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in social and political movements. We consider the definitions and boundaries of the TMMC, arguing particularly for a historically rooted conception of technological development that allows better integration of the different intellectual traditions that are currently focused on the same set of empirical phenomena. We then delineate two recurrent debates in the literature highlighting their contributions to emerging knowledge. The first debate concerns the divide between scholars who privilege media technologies, and see them as driving forces of movement dynamics, and those who privilege media practices over affordances. The second debate broadly opposes theorists who believe in the emancipatory potential of ICTs and those who highlight the ways they are used to repress social movements and grassroots mobilization. By mapping positions in these debates to the TMMC we identify and provide direction to three broad research areas which demand further consideration: (i) questions of power and agency in social movements; (ii) the relationships between, on the one hand, social movements and technology and media as politics (i.e. cyberpolitics and technopolitics), and on the other, the quotidian and ubiquitous use of digital tools in a digital age; and (iii) the significance of digital divides that cut across and beyond social movements, particularly in the way such divisions may overlay existing power relations in movements. In conclusion, we delineate six challenges for profitable further research on the TMMC.
Young people face injustice and discrimination
Young people are more sensitive to injustices and discriminations personally endured. On the contrary, they are less sensitive to social injustice in the whole society. This paper explores some of the possible explanations of this paradox : specific traits of injustices personally endured by young people, social compositional effects of the young people group compared with adults, which contributes to moderate the sensitivity to social injustice, kinds of links, among youngsters, between political attitudes and perception of social injustice
JEL : D63, I24, J60.
La campagne présidentielle française de 2012 a été marquée par une variété d’actions proposées aux internautes par les équipes de campagne ou initiées par les internautes eux-mêmes pour s’engager en ligne et hors ligne en faveur de tel ou tel candidat. La profusion de ces pratiques interroge les techniques et notions nécessaires à leur appréhension, l’élasticité du concept de participation politique mais aussi les liens qu’elles entretiennent avec les pratiques traditionnelles de l’engagement et du militantisme (telles que par exemple, la propension à discuter de politique ou le fait de participer à un meeting). À partir d’une catégorisation permettant d’appréhender la diversité des actes participatifs réalisés durant la campagne, cet article propose d’explorer d’une part les variations observables dans les profils sociodémographiques selon le type d’activités réalisées en ligne, d’autre part les modalités d’articulation entre la participation en ligne et la participation hors ligne. Cette analyse est fondée sur les données recueillies par un questionnaire durant les trois semaines qui suivirent l’élection présidentielle auprès de 827 internautes français ayant utilisé Internet à des fins électorales pendant la campagne.
This book draws on a wealth of evidence including young people’s own stories, to document how they are now faring in increasingly unequal societies like America, Britain, Australia, France and Spain. It points to systematic generational inequality as those born since 1980 become the first generation to have a lower standard of living than previous generations. While governments and experts typically explain this by referring to globalisation, new technologies, or young people’s deficits, the authors of this book offer a new political economy of generations which identifies the central role played by governments promoting neoliberal policies that exacerbate existing social inequalities based on age, ethnicity, gender and class. The book is a must read for social science students, human service workers and policy-makers and indeed for anyone interested in understanding the impact of government policy over the last 40 years on young people.
The eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government (JeDEM) is a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal (ISSN: 2075-9517) published twice a year. It addresses theory and practice in the areas of eDemocracy and Open Government as well as eGovernment, eParticipation, and eSociety. JeDEM publishes ongoing and completed research, case studies and project descriptions that are selected after a rigorous blind review by experts in the field. More information: www.jedem.org Acknowledgement: I would like to thank my Master students Oliver Coronel, Manuela Diethelm, Corina Frueh, and Karoline Lässer for contributing to the state-of-the art and conducting expert interviews.
As with other communication technologies, the Internet influences the behaviour of individuals and organizations, intervening on the mode of interaction at the individual and collective levels. Even more than with other means of communication — such as press, telegraph, radio, television, telephone, fax, and so on — it seems that social scientists expect such important changes from the electronic revolution as to require specific concepts. E-participation, e-governance, and e-voting are all specifications of a more general transformation brought about by the new technologies, to the point of promoting an e-democracy, defined by increased opportunities for citizens to participate in politics, thanks to the Internet (Rose 2005). As with other technologies, the debate on their advantages and disadvantages has long polarized observers between sceptics and enthusiasts. From this point of view, the debate and research on the Internet has been intertwined with that on the various qualities of democracy with which this volume is concerned.
Van Deth’s comprehensive ‘conceptual map of political participation’ has reinstated a lively debate about the concept of political participation, and provides some compelling solutions to it. However, an important question that has been raised is whether van Deth’s map actually achieves its main goal of unambiguously identifying and classifying emerging, complex types of participation, like online political activism – or lifestyle politics. To contribute to this debate, this article aims to evaluate the usefulness of van Deth’s approach for the analysis of lifestyle politics. Such an evaluation requires a clear classification of lifestyle politics. This, however, is still missing from the literature. The second aim of this article, therefore, is to identify and classify different types of lifestyle politics. On the basis of a literature review, this article argues that lifestyle politics are often enacted throughout different private, public and institutional arenas, and that they are often targeted at various social, economic and political actors at once. Applying van Deth’s conceptual map to these empirical realities, then, suggests that it cannot always account for their complexity sufficiently. Therefore, this article proposes a modification of van Deth’s framework that increases its usefulness for analyzing emerging, complex political participation repertoires.
The Logic of Connective Action explains the rise of a personalized digitally networked politics in which diverse individuals address the common problems of our times such as economic fairness and climate change. Rich case studies from the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany illustrate a theoretical framework for understanding how large-scale connective action is coordinated using inclusive discourses such as “We Are the 99%” that travel easily through social media. in many of these mobilizations, communication operates as an organizational process that may replace or supplement familiar forms of collective action based on organizational resource mobilization, leadership, and collective action framing. in some cases, connective action emerges from crowds that shun leaders, as when Occupy protesters created media networks to channel resources and create loose ties among dispersed physical groups. in other cases, conventional political organizations deploy personalized communication logics to enable large-scale engagement with a variety of political causes. The Logic of Connective Action shows how power is organized in communication-based networks, and what political outcomes may result.
Digital social media have been widely adopted in protest mobilizations. Are social media thus the leaflets and political posters of the early 21st century? Or do they, as some authors have claimed, fundamentally alter the conditions for the emergence of protest and social movements? This chapter discusses the findings of existing studies on social movements and social media and assesses to which extent some authors’ claims about the fundamental importance of social media technologies in recent protests and uprisings can be substantiated in empirical studies of protest mobilizations or whether the results lend more support for the claim that social media did not fundamentally influence the mobilization dynamics. It starts which a quick overview over the use of internet technologies by social movements since the 1990s, discusses then four general claims about the relationship between internet and social media on the one hand and social movements and protest on the other. It then proceeds to a closer look at recent empirical studies of protest and social media, closing with an evaluation of the current knowledge and remaining research gaps in this field. Special attention is payed to the question how current digital communication tools interact with more established elements in social movements’ repertoires of action.
Both anecdotal and case-study evidence have long suggested that consumer behavior such as the buying or boycotting of products and services for political and ethical reasons can take on political significance. Despite recent claims that such behavior has become more widespread in recent years, political consumerism has not been studied systematically in survey research on political participation. Through the use of a pilot survey conducted among 1015 Canadian, Belgian, and Swedish students, we ascertain whether political consumerism is a sufficiently consistent behavioral pattern to be measured and studied meaningfully. The data from this pilot survey allow us to build a “political consumerism index” incorporating attitudinal, behavioral, and frequency measurements. Our analysis of this cross-national student sample suggests that political consumerism is primarily a tool of those who are distrustful of political institutions. However, political consumers have more trust in other citizens, and they are disproportionately involved in checkbook organizations. They also tend to score highly on measures of political efficacy and post-materialism. We strongly suggest including measurements of political consumerism together with other emerging forms of activism in future population surveys on political participation.
Academic observers and public intellectuals frequently criticize mass email action alerts as “slacktivism” or “clicktivism,” arguing that the lowered transaction costs of the medium produce a novel form of activism that carries with it hidden costs and dangers for the public sphere. This article challenges those claims, relying on a combination of personal observation within the advocacy community and on a new quantitative dataset of advocacy group email activity to articulate three points. First, that mass emails are functionally equivalent to the photocopied and faxed petitions and postcards of “offline” activism, and represent a difference-of-degree rather than a difference-in-kind. Second, that such low-quality, high-volume actions are a single tactic in the strategic repertoire of advocacy groups, thus reducing cause for concern about their limited effect in isolation. Third, that the empirical reality of email activation practices has little in common with the dire predictions offered by common critiques. The article responds to a previous Policy & Internet article: “The Case Against Mass E-mails.” 1 (1).
This paper examines political elites and citizens use of the web during the 2007 and 2012 French presidential campaign particularly with the aim of testing the normalization hypothesis at two levels of analysis – supply and demand. It is based on a quantitative content analysis of the candidates' websites and two surveys of French Internet users. The results present a challenge to the normalization thesis at the elite level in that despite a strong division in online performance between the major and other candidates in 2007, by 2012 the minor candidates outperformed their major counterparts Among voters the results also run somewhat contrary to normalization with a weakening in the significance of socio-demographic factors in determining traditional types of online engagement. In addition, the new social media sphere appears to encourage younger and less politicized citizens to participate. The importance of prior political attitudes such as interest and trust, however, remain strong.
This article proposes a framework for understanding large-scale individualized collective action that is often coordinated through digital media technologies. Social fragmentation and the decline of group loyalties have given rise to an era of personalized politics in which individually expressive personal action frames displace collective action frames in many protest causes. This trend can be spotted in the rise of large-scale, rapidly forming political participation aimed at a variety of targets, ranging from parties and candidates, to corporations, brands, and transnational organizations. The group-based “identity politics” of the “new social movements” that arose after the 1960s still exist, but the recent period has seen more diverse mobilizations in which individuals are mobilized around personal lifestyle values to engage with multiple causes such as economic justice (fair trade, inequality, and development policies), environmental protection, and worker and human rights.
From the Arab Spring and los indignados in Spain, to Occupy Wall Street (and beyond), large-scale, sustained protests are using digital media in ways that go beyond sending and receiving messages. Some of these action formations contain relatively small roles for formal brick and mortar organizations. Others involve well-established advocacy organizations, in hybrid relations with other organizations, using technologies that enable personalized public engagement. Both stand in contrast to the more familiar organizationally managed and brokered action conventionally associated with social movement and issue advocacy. This article examines the organizational dynamics that emerge when communication becomes a prominent part of organizational structure. It argues that understanding such variations in large-scale action networks requires distinguishing between at least two logics that may be in play: The familiar logic of collective action associated with high levels of organizational resources and the formation of collective identities, and the less familiar logic of connective action based on personalized content sharing across media networks. In the former, introducing digital media do not change the core dynamics of the action. In the case of the latter, they do. Building on these distinctions, the article presents three ideal types of large-scale action networks that are becoming prominent in the contentious politics of the contemporary era.
Although boycotts are increasingly relevant for management decision making, there has been little research of an individual consumer's motivation to boycott. Drawing on the helping behavior and boycott literature, the authors take a cost-benefit approach to the decision to boycott and present a conceptualization of motivations for boycott participation. The authors tested their framework during an actual boycott of a multinational firm that was prompted by factory closings. Consumers who viewed the closures as egregious were more likely to boycott the firm, though only a minority did so. Four factors are found to predict boycott participation: the desire to make a difference, the scope for self-enhancement, counterarguments that inhibit boycotting, and the cost to the boycotter of constrained consumption. Furthermore, self-enhancement and constrained consumption are significant moderators of the relationship between the perceived egregiousness of the firm's actions and boycott participation. The authors also explore the role of perceptions of others' participation and discuss implications for marketers, nongovernmental organizations, policymakers, and researchers.
Shows how social change affects political mobilization indirectly through the restructuring of existing power relations, comparing the impact of the ecology, gay rights, peace, and women's movements in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Of interest to students and researchers in political science and sociology.
List of tables List of figures Preface Introduction: 1. The decline and fall of political activism? 2. Theories of political activism Part I. The Puzzle of Electoral Turnout: 3. Mapping turnout 4. Do institutions matter? 5. Who votes? Part II. Political Parties: 6. Mapping party activism 7. Who joins? Part III. Social Capital and Civic Society: 8. Social capital and civic society 9. Traditional mobilising agencies: unions and churches 10. New social movements, protest politics and the internet 11. Conclusions: the reinvention of political activism? Appendix: comparative framework Notes Select bibliography Index.
This article has no abstract.
In recent decades the study of social movements, revolution, democratization and other non-routine politics has flourished. And yet research on the topic remains highly fragmented, reflecting the influence of at least three traditional divisions. The first of these reflects the view that various forms of contention are distinct and should be studied independent of others. Separate literatures have developed around the study of social movements, revolutions and industrial conflict. A second approach to the study of political contention denies the possibility of general theory in deference to a grounding in the temporal and spatial particulars of any given episode of contention. The study of contentious politics are left to 'area specialists' and/or historians with a thorough knowledge of the time and place in question. Finally, overlaid on these two divisions are stylized theoretical traditions - structuralist, culturalist, and rationalist - that have developed largely in isolation from one another. This book was first published in 2001.
De la discussion politique à la manifestation de rue, du vote à la consommation engagée, de la grève des urnes à celle de l'impôt ou à l'Internet militant, cet ouvrage porte un regard novateur sur une question centrale en démocratie : la "participation politique". Une participation foisonnante, multiforme, contournant les canaux institutionnels, débordant les frontières de l'État nation, mais toujours inégalitaire. Il présente les grands modèles explicatifs et leurs applications concrètes, les auteurs marquants, les concepts clés de la sociologie politique contemporaine, tant française qu'étrangère, ainsi que les principaux débats qui la traversent. S'appuyant sur les grandes enquêtes tant hexagonales (Cevipof) qu'internationales (ESS, Enquêtes valeurs, ISSP) depuis les années 60, l'auteur resitue le cas français dans une perspective historique, comparative et interdisciplinaire. Autant d'atouts qui font de ce livre un outil indispensable pour penser la redéfinition des frontières du politique, et la référence pour aborder la "crise" de la représentation que traversent toutes les démocraties occidentales.
This book adopts a critical youth studies approach and theorizes the digital as a key feature of the everyday to analyse how ideas about youth and cyber-safety, digital inclusion and citizenship are mobilized. Despite a growing interest in the benefits and opportunities for young people online, both ‘young people’ and ‘the digital’ continue to be constructed primarily as sites of social and cultural anxiety requiring containment and control. Juxtaposing public policy, popular educational and parental framings of young people’s digital practices with the insights from fieldwork conducted with young Australians aged 12–25, the book highlights the generative possibilities of attending to intergenerational tensions. In doing so, the authors show how a shift beyond the paradigm of control opens up towards a deeper understanding of the capacities that are generated in and through digital life for young and old alike. Young People in Digital Society will be of interest to scholars and students in youth studies, cultural studies, sociology, education, and media and communications.
In this article, we employ data from comparative claims analysis of five major newspapers in nine European countries between 2010 and 2016 to examine discourse around youth. We look at the ways in which collective actors frame youth in the public domain and how this may provide discursive opportunities understood in terms of the extent to which public discourse portrays young people as agents of social change. More specifically, we argue that young people are depoliticized in the public domain. We find that public statements and more generally public discourse about youth tend to depict them as actors who do not have political aims or to focus on other, nonpolitical characteristics. Our exploratory analysis shows that, while youth are fairly present as actors in the public domain, they are only rarely addressed or discussed in political terms. Moreover, where they are addressed politically, it is in negative terms, with few political claims. At the same time, we observe important cross-national variations, whereby the depoliticization process looks to be further matured in some countries relative to others. This process of depoliticization of youth in the public domain, in turn, has important implications on their potential for acting as political agents and for their political activism.
This article examines the politicization processes of ordinary digital practices as well as its role in the constitution of new protester groups. Its interest is also represented by the construction of an original theoretical framework aiming to underline the complementarity between different theoretical perspectives. By encouraging a connection between the sociology of social movements, the critical Theory and the studies of “information practices”, the author elaborates a new approach to mobilisation focused on the emergence of a more and more citizen’s engaged position with regard to the “information world” and not only based on militant uses of the media. While claiming a critical approach, the enquiry shows the role played by the “resistant info-communication practices” in the construction of new “collective action frames”.
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.
This new comparative analysis shows that there are reasons to be concerned about the future of democratic politics. Younger generations have become disengaged from the political process. The evidence presented in this comprehensive study shows that they are not just less likely than older generations to engage in institutional political activism such as voting and party membership - they are also less likely to engage in extra-institutional protest activism. Generations, Political Participation and Social Change in Western Europe offers a rigorously researched empirical analysis of political participation trends across generations in Western Europe. It examines the way in which the political behaviour of younger generations leads to social change. Are younger generations completely disengaged from politics, or do they simply choose to participate in a different way to previous generations?. The book is of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of political sociology, political participation and behaviour, European Politics, Comparative Politics and Sociology.
We challenge the common wisdom that the Great Recession has produced radical changes in political behavior. Accordingly, we assess the extent to which the crisis has spurred protest activities and given socioeconomic issues a higher saliency in public debates. We also assess how far the crisis has provided a more prominent place for economic and labor actors as subject actors, a more prominent place of economic and labor actors as object actors, as well as a more prominent place of economic and labor actors as addressees in claims making on the economic crisis. Our findings show that the crisis has not produced such radical changes in all these aspects, though it had some impact. At a more general level, our analysis unveils the normative underpinnings of the commonly held view that the economic crisis has fed a grievance‐based conflict between capital and labor going beyond specific patterns and configurations in each country.
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Zamponi , Lorenzo , and Lorenzo Bosi . 2016 . “.” Politics & Policy 44 (): 400–426. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12156/abstract
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This article examines the medium-specific and spill-over effects from various aspects of using social networking sites (SNS) to other forms of online and offline political participation. The study relies on a two-wave panel survey of undergraduate students at a major Canadian university, which was designed to measure detailed aspects of political participation on social networking sites (SNS) and various other forms of political engagement. Our results show that prior political Facebook participation fosters other forms of online participation, but also reveals some spill-over effects to offline protests. Indeed, we find a reciprocal relationship between the posting of Facebook messages and offline protest, confirming that Facebook political activity is both mobilizing and reinforcing.
While the study of e-participation has gained increasing attention within political science, our understanding of its underlying structure and relationship to offline participation is limited. This article addresses these gaps by focusing on three interrelated questions: (1) Is e-participation a multidimensional phenomenon (differentiation hypothesis)? (2) If submodes exist, do they mirror existing modes of participation (replication hypothesis)? (3) If offline forms are replicated online, do they mix together (integration hypothesis) or operate in separate spheres (independence hypothesis)? We test our hypotheses through confirmatory factor analysis of original survey data from the U.K. General Election of 2010. The results show that distinct submodes of e-participation, comparable to those occurring offline, can be identified. Support for integration and independence varies according to the type of participation undertaken. Finally our results suggest that the online environment may be fostering a new social-media-based type of expressive political behavior.
High-profile political scandals are symptomatic of a profound transformation of the relations between public and private life that has accompanied and helped to shape the development of modern societies. While the distinction between public and private life is not unique to modern societies, the emergence of new media of communication, from print to radio, television and the internet, has altered the very nature of the public, the private and the relations between them. Both the public and the private have been reconstituted as spheres of information and symbolic content that are largely detached from physical locales and increasingly interwoven with evolving technologies of communication, creating a very fluid situation in which the boundaries between public and private are blurred, porous, contestable and subject to constant negotiation and struggle. The shifting boundaries between public and private life have become a new battleground in modern societies, a contested terrain where individuals and organizations wage a new kind of information war, a terrain where established relations of power can be challenged and disrupted, lives damaged and reputations sometimes lost.
The role of traditional media and the Internet in relation to young people’s political participation has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Starting from a notion of differential media use and an encompassing notion of political participation, this article tests the relationships between media use (newspaper, television, and Internet) and offline and online forms of political participation. Findings from a national survey (n = 2,409, age 16 to 24) reveal that a variety of Internet uses are positively related with different forms of political participation, whereas the relationship between most uses of traditional media and participation are weak, albeit positive. The study rejects the predictive power of duration of media use but finds support for the type of media use. Positive relationships between online communication and noninformational uses of the Internet vis-à-vis participation are found. The research demonstrates how a wider and more contemporary conception of political participation, together with more detailed measures of media use, can help to gain better insight in the roles media can play in affecting participatory behavior among the Internet generation.
