Erik Amnå

Political participation and civic engagement: Towards a new typology

Reviewing the literature on political participation and civic engagement, the article offers a critical examination of different conceptual frameworks. Drawing on previous definitions and operationalisations, a new typology for political participation and civic engagement is developed, highlighting the multidimensionality of both concepts. In particular, it makes a clear distinction between manifest “political participation” (including formal political behaviour as well as protest or extra-parliamentary political action) and less direct or “latent” forms of participation, conceptualized here as “civic engagement” and “social involvement”. The article argues that the notion of “latent” forms of participation is crucial to understand new forms of political behaviour and the prospects for political participation in different countries. Due to these innovations it contributes to a much-needed theoretical development within the literature on political participation and citizen engagement.

How is civic engagement developed over time? Emerging answers from a multidisciplinary field.

Insights into the development of civic values, attitudes, knowledge, skills and behaviours are greatly demanded by adults worried about a seemingly steady decline in the societal interest of their offspring. Hence, the collection of studies in this special issue on civic engagement in adolescence is not only timely and enlightening, but it also has the potentials to contribute to research in different disciplines on various dimensions, mechanisms and normative models of civic engagement. The studies reveal some promising attempts to bring civil themes into the field of adolescent development. However, to overcome some conceptual, methodological and empirical shortcomings, future developmental studies in the area need to be substantially improved by considering cultural and institutional conditions, by focussing on processes across various everyday life contexts, by merging theories from different disciplinary fields, by conceptualizing adolescents as changeable subjects, and by delineating untested and unwarranted normative assumptions.

Standby Citizens : Diverse Faces of Political Passivity

The current debate on political participation is bound to a discussion about whether citizens are active or passive. This dichotomous notion is nurtured by an extensive normative debate concerning ...

The longitudinal relation between online and offline political participation among youth at two different developmental stages

The role played by the Internet in young people’s political lives has received great research attention. However, two gaps in the literature hinder the drawing of conclusions on how online political participation is related to its offline counterpart. First, although there are multiple hypotheses on the nature of the relationship, they have not been compared in any single study. Second, although the relation may differ according to developmental stage, age differences have not been examined. We address these gaps using longitudinal data from two samples of youth at different developmental stages, and test four hypotheses for each sample. It was found, among late adolescents, that online participation serves as a gateway to offline participation. However, among young adults, offline participation spills over into online participation. These findings indicate the positive potential of online political participation in youth’s political lives, and highlight the need to focus on their developmental stages.

The Personality Divide

Personality traits are considered efficient predictors of off-line political participation. However, the effects of personality traits on online political engagement have been largely understudied. The main goal of this cross-sectional research (N = 1,134, sample of young adults) was to investigate the relationships between personality traits, as measured by the Big Five Inventory, and online political engagement. As dependent variables, we took three dimensions of online political engagement: e-targeted, e-expressive, and e-news. A latent variables structural equation model showed that personality traits directly and indirectly predict modes of online political engagement via the mediation of political attitudes and the proneness to use Internet. On the whole, we found that people open to experience and extraverts take part in online political actions, whereas agreeable and conscientious people tend to avoid them. The findings provide insights on the differences between traditional form (i.e., off-line) and the new online modes of political engagement by showing that, to some extent, the latter appeal to different personality profiles. In sum, online engagement seems to be marked by a personality divide.

Scandinavian Democracies Learning Diversity

In this chapter, I want to first address how our Swedish cultural frame can be understood as composed by a combined set of values consisting of Lutheran religious values and state-individualistic orientations. In the following section, the institutional mechanisms are in focus; some of them indeed contested, but claimed to be of strong importance for deepening democracy. Then a case is introduced on how to deal politically with cultural diversity in Sweden when it comes to public education, namely the governmental commission on Swedish Imam training. Finally, some preliminary policy implications in order to handle diversity in a universal welfare state are recommended.

Apathy or alienation? Political passivity among youths across eight European Union countries

Abstract Political participation is one of the most studied aspects of the contemporary development of western democracies. A recent trend focuses the lack of political participation among younger generations. At the same time, the last decades have also witnessed a growth in the share of young European Union (EU) citizens who express alienation, and distrust toward social and political institutions at the national as well as the European level. By studying young people across different countries of the EU, the current study aims to examine if youths’ political passivity is better explained by political apathy or alienation. Our analyses are based on a comparative survey data collected by the Catch-EyoU project comprising approximately 4 454 late adolescents assembled from eight member countries of the EU. Results from logistic regressions predicting non-voting from apathy and alienation support the idea that political passivity is best understood as the result of political apathy. Moreover, it seems that the underlying separator of apathetic and alienated youths is cognitive awareness of political life. These results are discussed in relation to potentially built-in paradoxes of apathy present in efficient and well-functional welfare-state democracies.

The Development of Political Interest Among Adolescents: A Communication Mediation Approach Using Five Waves of Panel Data:

Political interest is one of the most important individual-level predictors of news media use, public opinion formation, and engagement. When, how, and why some citizens develop a strong interest in politics is, however, less clear. This study analyzes the development of political interest during the formative years of adolescence, using a five-wave panel study among Swedish adolescents, covering a period of 4 years. Based on the citizen communication mediation model, we analyze how interest in political and current affairs news among family and friends influence adolescents’ political interest. Taken together, while the findings lend support for several of the hypotheses, mechanisms, and processes derived from the communication mediation model, parents appear more important than peers when it comes to shaping adolescents’ political interest.

CATCH-EyoU Work Package 2 Dataset 2.1a - Full Consortium Collection of Literature. Derived Dataset

The dataset contains a textual corpus of references in academic literature concerning Europe, youth engagement and active citizenship. The references were searched, catalogued and summarized by CATCH-EyoU researchers in the fields of Cultural Studies, Education, History, Media and Communication, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. The analyzed literature consists of 779 selected texts. The dataset represents an integration of the CATCH-EyoU Work Package 2 Dataset 2.1a: Full Consortium Collection of Literature Matrix available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1313202. It relies on the following information: specific identifying information about the text itself (title/author/year/publisher); and abstract or summarizing information either taken directly from the text or summarized by the researcher. With respect to the CATCH-EyoU Work Package 2 Dataset 2.1a: Full Consortium Collection of Literature Matrix, the current dataset adds further information relative to each record, namely: identification number for each record; leading disciplinary field according to which the text was searched by the researchers. These integrations were used in specific lexicometric content analysis and the dataset allows its replication or further textual analyses.

Citizenship’s tangled web: Associations, gaps and tensions in formulations of European youth active citizenship across disciplines

Abstract How does academic literature across various disciplines conceptualize and empirically address active citizenship? What are the potential benefits and dangers of dominant epistemological and ideological perspectives on ‘good citizenship’? Our paper engages with these questions by drawing on literature across 12 disciplines. We used textual analysis software T-LAB to quantify and visualize co-occurrences, word associations and thematic clusters in the abstracts of 770 texts gathered by eight country teams and original in-depth qualitative analyses of ideological positions and discourses taken up in a selection of key texts across the corpus. Our paper elaborates the findings: that many of the key themes surrounding young people and citizenship in the literature share little or no connection with European citizenship; that there is a significant gap in the literature on young European citizens; and that studies connected to internal, status-based factors connected to citizenship are far more prevalent than those examining external, practice-based factors or dissidence and dissent. Our conclusions examine the potential normative implications of the disjuncture between dominant conceptions and critical accounts of youth active citizenship.