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What is political participation.

• Jan W. van Deth Jan W. van Deth Department of Political Sociology, University of Mannheim
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.68
• Published online: 22 November 2016
• This version: 29 September 2021
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Vibrant democracies are characterized by a continuous expansion of the available forms of participation. This expansion has confronted many researchers with the dilemma of using either a dated conceptualization of participation and excluding many new modes of political action or stretching their concept to cover almost everything. Many newer, “creative,” “personalized,” and “individualized” modes of participation such as political consumption, street parties, or guerrilla gardening, are hard to define because they basically concern nonpolitical activities used for political purposes. Especially using internet-based technologies for these activities (“connective action”) makes it very difficult to recognize political participation. Social, societal, and political developments in democratic societies have made the search for a single encompassing definition of political participation obsolete. Therefore, an alternative approach is to integrate the core features of political participation in a conceptual map. Five modes cover the whole range of political participation systematically and efficiently, based on the locus (polity), targeting (government area or community problems), and circumstance (context or motivations) of these activities. While especially the rise of expressive modes of participation requires the inclusion of contextual information or the aims and goals of participants, attention is paid to the (dis)advantages of including these aspects as defining criteria for political participation. A conceptual map of political participation offers a comprehensive answer to the question “What is political participation?” without excluding future participatory innovations that are the hallmark of a vibrant democracy.

• participation
• collective action

Updated in this version

A few small errors and ambiguities corrected. Bibliography expanded and updated.

Participation and Democracy

Political participation can be loosely defined as citizens’ activities affecting politics. Ever since the famous funeral speech of Pericles ( 431 bce ), politicians and scholars have stressed the unique character of democracy by emphasizing the role of ordinary citizens in political affairs. By now, the list of participatory activities has become virtually infinite and includes actions such as voting, demonstrating, contacting public officials, boycotting, attending party rallies, guerrilla gardening, posting blogs, volunteering, joining flash mobs, signing petitions, buying fair-trade products, and even suicide protests. Political participation is relevant for any political system, but it is an indispensable feature of democracy: “Where few take part in decisions there is little democracy; the more participation there is in decisions, the more democracy there is” (Verba & Nie, 1972 , p. 1). Thus, the extent and scope of political participation are important—perhaps even decisive—criteria for assessing the quality of democracy.

The growing salience of government and politics for everyday life, the blurring of distinctions between private and public spheres, the increasing competences and resources (especially education) of citizens, and the availability of an abundance of political information resulted in a continuous expansion of available forms of participation. While the political nature of the activities is immediately clear for elections, demonstrations, or letters-to-the-editor, this is much more ambiguous if we are dealing with the purchase of sneakers manufactured under specific conditions, the secret planting of public green spaces, or clicking “like” on the site of a group advocating the protection of whales in the north Atlantic. The list of these last examples can be extended simply—and with each additional form the problems of demarcating political participation become more evident.

Apparently, almost every activity by some citizen somehow can be understood sometimes as a form of political participation (van Deth, 2001 ). Yet this expansion—or fragmentation—has confronted many researchers with the dilemma of using either a dated conceptualization excluding many new modes of political participation or stretching their concept to cover almost everything. Demarcation problems are especially evident for many newer, “creative,” “personalized,” and “individualized” modes of participation such as political consumption or street parties or guerrilla gardening, which basically concern nonpolitical activities used for political purposes. Moreover, the use of internet-based technologies for these activities (“connective action”) has made it almost impossible to recognize political participation at first sight.

The most important consequence of the waning analytical sharpness of the concept of political participation is that it significantly hinders the assessment of the quality of democracy. Whereas a restricted definition of participation usually results in rather pessimistic conclusions (e.g., decreasing electoral turnout challenges the legitimacy of representative democracy), broader approaches typically present less alarming inferences (e.g., rapidly spreading political consumerism shows that ordinary people are very committed). 1 In fact, assessments of the quality of democracy rely directly on the question of which forms of political behavior are considered to be specimens of political participation. A mutual understanding of political participation, therefore, is a conditio sine qua none for meaningful discussions about participation and, more importantly, for every discourse on the merits and chances of democracy.

To find a comprehensive solution for these conceptual problems, neither the development of all-encompassing nominal definitions nor deductive analyses of prevailing forms of participation seem to be helpful. This article does not attempt to develop a single, comprehensive definition of political participation, but follows an alternative and very different strategy instead. The core features of political participation are integrated in a conceptual map of political participation covering five distinct, clearly specified variants of political participation (van Deth, 2014 ). These variants systematically and efficiently cover the whole range of political participation systematically and efficiently, based on the locus (polity), targeting (government area or community problems), and circumstance (context or motivations) of these activities. Additionally, the conceptual map of political participation offered could easily include future participatory innovations, which are the hallmark of a vibrant democracy.

Expanding Participation

The main features of political participation are clear and undisputed. First, it is understood as an activity (or action)—simply watching television or being interested in politics does not constitute participation. Political participation, second, is voluntary and not ordered by a ruling class or obliged under some law. Third, participation refers to activities of people in their role as nonprofessionals or amateurs and not, say, as politicians, civil servants, or lobbyists. Fourth, political participation concerns government, politics, or the state in broad senses of these words and is not restricted to specific phases (such as parliamentary decision-making processes or executing laws) or to specific levels or areas (such as national elections or contacts with party officials). Thus, any voluntary, nonprofessional activity concerning government, politics, or the state is a specimen of political participation.

Various types of political behavior meeting these criteria can be easily identified: casting a vote, signing a petition, or filing an objection are plain examples of specific forms of political participation. By increasing the level of abstraction, participation can be understood as a latent concept (usually measured as a continuum) covering more than one form of participation as specific manifestations. Several forms of participation sharing some basic feature are called a mode or type of participation. For instance, voting and party activities can be depicted together as an electoral mode of participation. A repertoire of political participation unites all available forms—and, of course, all modes—of participation (cf. Tilly, 1995 , pp. 41–48).

The repertoire of political participation expanded continuously over the last five or six decades; that is, new forms of participation were constantly added to existing activities. Since the scope of government activities and responsibilities also expanded in many countries in the last decades, the domain of political participation grew considerably. That is, political participation has become relevant in areas that would have been considered private, social, or economic only a few decades ago. Typically, empirical political participation research follows expansions of the repertoire and the domain of participation with some delay and with discussions about the nature of newly added activities as forms of political participation. These developments can be easily traced with the publication of a few landmark studies.

By the mid- 20th century the rise of representative democracy and the struggle for universal suffrage in many democracies resulted in a rather strict understanding of political participation as election-related activities. Consequently, the seminal voting studies of the 1940s and 1950s focused on forms of political participation such as voting, campaigning, and party membership (Berelson et al., 1954 ). Contacts between citizens and government officials were added to this repertoire and by the early 1960s political participation was broadly understood as voting and other citizen activities in the context of statutory political institutions (Campbell et al., 1960 ). Due to the growing relevance of community politics, the repertoire of political participation gradually included direct contacts between citizens, public officials, and politicians, as well as “communal activities” relaxing the initial strong focus on election-related activities (Verba & Nie, 1972 ; Verba et al., 1978 ). These activities became known as conventional or institutionalized modes of participation.

Rapid social and political developments in the late 1960s and early 1970s encompassed remarkable proliferations of citizens’ involvement, making clear that political participation is not restricted to broadly accepted actions or institutionalized activities. Dissent, disapproval, rejection, and provocation are evidently expressions of citizens’ interests and opinions and therefore should be included in the repertoire of democratic political participation (Barnes, Kaase et al., 1979 ). These newer forms of participation also included many protest actions organized by upcoming “New Social Movements” initiated by pacifist, ecological, squatters’, and women’s groups. Because these activities were not in line with social norms of the early 1970s, they were labeled unconventional modes of participation. In addition, terms such as elite-challenging modes of participation (Inglehart, 1990 ), contentious politics (Tilly & Tarrow, 2006 ), or simply protest have been widely used to underline the fact that these activities present specific claims and usually reject existing social and political arrangements.

After the risks of continuously growing government expenditures became visible in the 1980s, citizens’ civil engagement was strengthened as an attractive alternative to state intervention. The disappearing borderline between political and nonpolitical spheres and the revival of Tocquevillean and communitarian approaches stimulated the next expansion of the repertoire of political participation with civil activities, volunteering, and social engagement in all kinds of voluntary associations. Especially the use of these activities at the community level had been recognized as a mode of participation earlier (Verba & Nie, 1972 ; Verba et al., 1978 ). Tocquevillean and communitarian argumentations, however, emphasize that the quality of democracy is directly related to the existence of a vibrant civil society (Putnam, 1993 ). Yet the question of whether civil activities, volunteering, and social engagement are specimens of political participation is still disputed, and the idea obviously challenges the use of simple definitions of the concept. The disappearing borderline between political and nonpolitical societal spheres also stimulated forms of participation that explicitly deny the need for organizations or organized actions. Instead, a strong emphasis lies on the expression of moral and ethical standpoints in actions that can be practiced by individual citizens alone. Important examples of such modes of creative participation or individualized collective action are boycotts and buycotts: citizens using their consumer power to achieve political goals (Micheletti, 2003 ; Stolle & Micheletti, 2013 ).

The spread of internet-based technologies facilitates these individualized actions by offering opportunities to express ideas, demands, and frustrations that are instantly accessible to everyone at practically no cost. Furthermore, these technologies make typical political associations even more superfluous. Using the internet as a mode of participation in itself—and not just a modern way to mobilize participants—is covered by the label connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013 ).

The continuous expansion of the repertoire of political participation is matched by a similar expansion in empirical research. Survey-based studies, however, cannot simply expand the list of questionnaire items because only relatively small parts of the populations are involved in most forms of participation. And standardized techniques do not cover newly arising forms in their early stages. Analyses of media coverage of political events appear more adequate for detecting the rise and spread of new forms of participation and usually report long lists of protests, riots, stunts, street actions, and the like (see Ortiz et al., 2013 ). Interviewing activists also offers opportunities for tracing new forms of political behavior and is widely used in research on party members (see van Haute & Gauja, 2015 ) and on social movements (see Klandermans et al., 2014 ). The enormous amount of data available on the internet is still rather difficult to explore empirically due to restrictive policies of providers and the conceptual complications of distinguishing between communication, mobilization, and participation (see Cantijoch et al., 2014 ).

Thus, the recent expansions of the repertoire of political participation in democratic societies seem to be based on a shift in the nature of involvement. Older modes of political participation are specific activities devised and used to influence political processes: casting a vote, joining a demonstration, or supporting a candidate are all examples of such activities. As such, refusals to buy a specific brand of coffee, volunteering in a hospital, being a member of a sports club, or posting a blog on whales are not specimens of political participation, but nonpolitical activities that can be used for political purposes. These activities need not require some organization or coordinated action. Surely, to be effective a large number of people should behave in a similar way, but they can all act individually, separately, and with distinct aims and motivations. Furthermore, the internet reduces organizational costs of participation to practically nil, which enables all kinds of concerns and aims to be mobilized that would not have been articulated before. As a consequence of this “profusion of self-actualizing, digitally mediated DIY politics” (Bennett, 2012 , p. 12), almost everybody can choose to be politically active about anything at any moment in time. In this way, the recent expansions of the repertoire of political participation differ clearly from previous enlargements. By now almost every conceivable nonprivate activity can be understood as a form of political participation when a political context is evident or political goals are manifest. If—in specific circumstances—the purchase of coffee or volunteering in a hospital can be considered a specimen of political participation just as going to the polls or signing a petition against government policies is, how, then, do we recognize a form of participation if we see one?

Expanding the Concept of Participation

Political participation has been defined in many ways (Brady, 1998 ; Conge, 1988 ; Fox, 2013 ; van Deth, 2001 ), 2 ranging from rather restrictive understandings as “those activities by private citizens that are more or less directly aimed at influencing the selection of governmental personnel and/or the actions they take” (Verba & Nie, 1972 , p. 2) to very broad approaches referring to political participation as “a categorical term for citizen power” (Arnstein, 1969 , p. 216) or to all activities aiming to influence existing power structures. As these examples show, increasing the level of abstraction allows us to cover new forms of participation easily—at the price of losing analytical rigor and empirical precision. Neither the search for common aspects among available (nominal) definitions of political participation nor the enumeration of various forms of participation seem to result in an encompassing conceptualization of political participation. A more pragmatic approach is needed based on the identification of indispensable requirements for some phenomenon to be recognized as a specimen of political participation. In other words, the initial question, “What is political participation?” is converted into a practical task; that is, how to recognize a form of participation when you see one.

A fresh approach can be based on the development of an operational definition of political participation specifying the exact properties that are required to determine its existence. In his seminal work on taxonomies and classifications, Hempel ( 1965 ) pointed to two general requirements for operational definitions. First, an operational definition should provide “objective criteria by means of which any scientific investigator can decide, for any particular case, whether the term does or does not apply” (Hempel, 1965 , p. 141). By pointing to, for instance, voluntariness or government directedness in definitions of political participation, such criteria are already widely used in exactly this way. What is needed is a systematically developed set of decision rules to answer the question of whether we depict a specific phenomenon as political participation. Second, Hempel not only stated that these decision rules have to be unambiguous but also stressed that they have to be efficient by placing them in a hierarchical order. In a hierarchically ordered classification each subgroup is “defined by the specification of necessary and sufficient conditions of membership” (Hempel, 1965 , p. 138). Following this recommendation for political participation we need to develop a minimalist definition of the concept before more complex variants are considered. 3 The advantage of this smallest set of decision rules is that we can deal with unproblematic cases easily. Because no sophisticated arguments are required to recognize voting or contacting a politician as a specimen of political participation, we should focus on properties that might bring community work, boycotting products, or blogging under the same label.

Suppose we have some phenomenon for which we want to know whether the term political participation does or does not apply. This question can be answered for any phenomenon by going through various steps, each representing a decision rule in a hierarchical scheme. If a certain property is available we move on to the next property—if a property is not found, the phenomenon under consideration is not a specimen of political participation. Figure 1 presents an overview of the decision rules proposed, each of which can be answered by confirming or rejecting the availability of a property with “yes” or “no,” respectively. The eight rules to define political participation can be briefly summarized in the following way:

Rule 1: Is it an activity or action? Nominal definitions of participation all start with references to behavioral aspects; participation requires an activity or action. Being interested in politics or watching newscasts is not sufficient.

Yet stressing the behavioral nature of any phenomenon eventually to be labeled as a specimen of political participation does not avoid all ambiguities. Specific abstentions of activities—for instance boycotting certain products, staying away from the ballot box, refusing to donate money—are, strictly speaking, not instances of activities or actions. Nonetheless, many people “regard their own decision not to participate in formal politics as itself a highly political act” (Hay, 2007 , p. 26). Only in case abstentions are used in similar ways as activities should these “activities” also be treated as a satisfactory fulfillment of this first rule’s requirement. That is, only refusing to buy truly obtainable products, staying at home on an actual election day, or refusing to pay charges are accepted as specimens of relevant “activities” here.

Rule 2: Is the activity voluntary? In a democracy political participation should not be a consequence of force, pressure, or threats, but be optional and based on free will.

Because examining a person’s free will is highly problematic in empirical research, a negative formulation emphasizing the absence of observable coercion—including unreasonably high costs—seems to be more practical. Examples of such coercions are, first of all, legal obligations or mandatory tasks. They are also economic or social extortions. However, paying taxes, sitting in a traffic jam, or being summoned to appear in court are all examples of involuntary acts with (potentially) political consequences that should be excluded from the concept of political participation. However, this rule does not exclude “compulsory voting” from the concept of political participation. Contrary to what the term suggests, actually casting a vote cannot be mandatory in any system guaranteeing secret elections (a main feature of democracy). In some countries citizens are obliged to report to the polling station on election day, but no democracy enforces actual voting.

Rule 3: Is the activity conducted by nonprofessionals? Most definitions explicitly refer to citizens in order to differentiate the relevant behavior from the activities of politicians, civil servants, office-bearers, public officers, journalists, and professional delegates, advisors, appointees, lobbyists, and the like.

Essential as the accomplishments of these functionaries and officials might be for the political system, using the concept of political participation in those instances would stretch the range of relevant behavior to cover conceptually and functionally very different phenomena. The same applies to commercial activities. Therefore, the term “citizen” is explicitly incorporated into many definitions of political participation to underline the nonprofessional, nonpaid, amateur nature of activities (Stoker, 2006 , Chapter 9). Some authors use the term “citizen participation” to avoid any misunderstanding (Callahan, 2007 ).

Rule 4: Is the activity located in the sphere of government/state/politics? The adjective “political” is a crucial part of any conceptualization of political participation.

Circular definitions are widely available and easy recognizable by the inclusion of terms such as “politics,” “political system,” “public policy,” or “policy process” in the explicans. Somewhat more informative are references to “government,” “government agencies,” or “public representatives and officials.” Although “politics,” “government,” or “democracy” are essentially contested concepts (Gallie, 1956 ), no conceptualization of political participation can avoid the question of whether the activities considered are located in the political sector of society; that is, the sector directed by government under the jurisdiction of state power. Since we want to arrive at a minimalist definition of political participation first, this rule should be based on the most straightforward condition available. The institutional architecture of the political system (“polity”) seems to fulfill this requirement.

These four decision rules already suffice to reach a minimalist definition of political participation. By focusing on the locus (or arena) of participation—rather than on outcomes, outputs, contexts, actors, intentions, etc.—as the defining characteristic, all nonprofessional, voluntary activities located in the sphere of government/state/politics are specimens of political participation (what I will label as Political Participation-I). These modes of participation include activities such as casting a vote (both in elections and referendums), submitting a petition, or supporting a party or candidate, as well as being active in forums such as “participatory budgeting.” Frequently used terms for activities meeting the four requirements of the minimalist definition are the above-mentioned “conventional,” “institutional,” “formal,” or “elite-directing” modes of political participation.

A minimal definition of participation obviously is not sufficient to cover citizens’ activities. Although early overviews of political participation research simply excluded “the politics of nongovernmental organizations” from the object of study (Milbrath, 1965 , p. 1), in any vibrant democracy new modes of political participation are introduced outside the regular government/state/politics sphere continuously and explicitly challenge the status quo. Hay ( 2007 ) pointed out forms of political participation that “take place outside of the governmental arena, yet respond to concerns that are formally recognized politically and on which there may well be active legislative or diplomatic agendas” (Hay, 2007 , p. 75). In case the activity concerned is not located in the sphere of government/state/politics (rule 4) a further rule is required to cover those activities:

Rule 5: Is the activity targeted at the sphere of government/state/politics? Activities that are not located in the government/state/politics arena can be considered as modes of political participation if they are targeted at that sphere.

Many of these modes are used to attract public attention to issues that either have not been perceived as problematic or have not been recognized as problems requiring governmental/state involvement so far. Certainly in the initial stage of their application these modes intend to challenge the conventional understanding of the scope and nature of politics and the domain of government in a society. Labels such as “contentious politics” (Tilly & Tarrow, 2006 ) or “elite-challenging politics” (Inglehart, 1990 , pp. 338–340) underline the conflicting nature of these activities. Although the actions usually aim at expanding the understanding of politics and government, they are also used to limit state intervention (for instance when workers blockade streets to stop the deregulation of labor conditions).

If the objectives of the activities indeed include politics or the addressees are located in government or the state, then this is a second main type of political participation (Political Participation-II). The decisive point is that this feature refers to the targets of the activities considered and not to the aims or intentions of activists. Targeted political activities are covered by, for example, the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive definition of “peaceful demonstrations” as “any peaceful gathering of more than 100 people for the primary purpose of displaying or voicing their opposition to government policies or authorities” (Banks, 2009 , as cited by Teorell, 2010 , p. 168). This definition clearly shows how the targets of the activities can be depicted without relying on the goals or intentions of the people involved.

Government and state agencies are not the only targets of political activities, and scholars of participation have frequently stressed the relevance of communal activities and voluntary associations (Verba & Nie, 1972 ; Verba et al., 1978 , 1995 ). Discussions about political participation and civic engagement indicate that participation seems to be increasingly focused “on problem solving and helping others” (Zukin et al., 2006 , p. 7). This conceptualization is too broad to produce a useful definition of political participation. Yet problem solving or helping others certainly can be accepted as modes of political participation if clearly private or nonpublic activities are excluded. To attain the adjective “political” for problem solving and helping others, these activities should be aimed at shared problems, which usually, but not necessarily, means that community problems are at the center. Hay ( 2007 ) brought this conceptualization to the point: “actions might be deemed political only in so far as they either arise out of situations of collective choice or are likely to have collective consequences, at whatever point these consequences arise” (p. 70). This solution seems more pragmatic than opening the debate on the essentially contested nature (Gallie, 1956 ) of concepts such as “politics,” “government,” or “democracy” once again. To deny the adjective “political” to attempts to solve collective or community problems would imply a restriction to government- and state-centered definitions of political participation, and—what is much more problematic—to an exclusion of activities by people who explicitly reject some borderline between “politics” and “society.” For that reason, these activities are distinguished from other modes of participation, but are not eliminated from the broader conceptualization of political participation:

Rule 6: Is the activity aimed at solving collective or community problems? Nonprofessional, voluntary activities that are not located in or targeted at the sphere of government/state/politics can be considered as modes of political participation if they are aimed at solving collective or community problems.

Notice that it is the character of the problem dealt with that has to be collective or shared, not the organizational aspects of the activities undertaken. Newer forms of participation are labeled as “individualized collective action” to underline this distinction (Micheletti, 2003 , p. 28; van Deth, 2010 ).

If this last condition is met, a second variant of a targeted definition of political participation is arrived at, now aimed at solving collective or community problems (Political Participation-III). Examples of activities belonging to this category are citizens’ initiatives or neighborhood committees. As with the government/politics/state–targeted definition, no references to aims or intentions of participants have to be considered for this second variant. Authors working in the field of civil society and social capital favor the depiction of activities aimed at solving collective or community problems as modes of political participation. Macedo and his collaborators defined civic engagement as “ any activity, individual or collective, devoted to influencing the collective life of the polity ” (Macedo et al., 2005 , p. 6; emphasis original)—a rather broad definition that perfectly matches the two types of targeted definitions of political participation (Political Participation-II and -III).

The expansion of the minimum definition with targeted definitions, however, still does not exhaust all citizens’ activities in a democracy. In case any one of the last three conditions (rules 4, 5, and 6) is not met we are apparently dealing with some voluntary, nonprofessional activity that is neither located in nor targeted at government/state/politics or at solving common problems. Such nonpolitical activities still can be used for political purposes and so become specimens of political participation. Especially newer, “creative,” “expressive,” “personalized,” and “individualized” modes of participation seem to fit this category. An important aspect of these newer modes of political participation is that they typically “refer not to ‘politics’ as a noun, but to the ‘political’ as an adjective, describing the motivations of actors wherever such motivations might be displayed” (Hay, 2007 , p. 63). The depiction of political participation as “responsibility taking” underlines the ethical and moral connotations attached to these forms (Stolle & Micheletti, 2013 , pp. 34–35).

An initial way to find out whether an apparently nonpolitical activity is used for political purposes is to consider the specific context of the activity. 4 For example, camping or staging a play are, as such, not political activities, but they can easily become so if they are done at the gates of Downing Street or in front of the European Central Bank (Theocharis, 2015 ). In a similar way, a picture on the web of people showing their backs might be a student gag, but it can be recognized as a form of political participation when the accompanying hashtag is not #partydance but #nonazis. Before we reach the border of our conceptual map, then, the circumstances of the activities have to be considered:

Rule 7: Is the activity placed in a political context? A voluntary, nonprofessional activity that does not meet any of the rules 4, 5, or 6 is a nonpolitical activity that can be recognized as a form of political participation if it takes place in a political context (Political Participation-IV).

Circumstantial evidence of this kind is derived from the surrounding, environment, background, or setting of these nonpolitical activities—not from the aims or intentions of the participants, although these participants might underline the political nature of their activities by contributing to the context of their actions.

A second way to trace political purposes of nonpolitical activities is to rely on explicit expressions of the person involved: buying a brand of coffee is, as such, not a political activity. However, this can easily become a political activity if the shopper explicitly expresses his intention that this purchase should be understood as an utterance against import regulations. Many definitions of political participation include explicit references to goals or intentions and embrace references to activities that “intend” or are “aimed at” influencing government policies or the selection of its personnel. Undoubtedly, political participation is usually initiated and guided by the wish to have some impact on existing arrangements (cf. Milbrath, 1965 ; Schlozman et al., 2012 ). The question, therefore, is not whether teleological aspects can or should be included in conceptualizations of political participation after we have dealt with minimalist, targeted, and contextual definitions—the question is how to consistently include such aspects in our understanding of political participation. After applying the first seven rules, no general answer to this question is required. The introduction of subjective aspects is only required when we reach nonpolitical activities at the endpoint of our set of decision-making rules:

Rule 8: Is the activity used to express political aims and intentions? Any activity that fulfills the first three rules—activity, voluntariness, nonprofessionally—but is not located in the political arena, is not aimed at either political actors or collective problems, and is not placed in a political context can be depicted as a form of political participation if the activity is used to express political aims and intentions by the participants.

For example, Micheletti ( 2003 ) stresses that “political consumerism is politics when people knowingly target market actors to express their opinions on justice, fairness, or noneconomic issues that concern personal and family well-being” (p. 14).

Depending on the aims and intentions of the participants, applying rule 8 results in a second variant of a circumstantial definition of political participation based on expressed intentions (Political Participation-V). This type covers all voluntary, nonpolitical activities by citizens used to express their political aims and intentions that do not fit into one of the previous four types of participation. With these activities we have obviously reached the final borderline of a conceptual map of political participation. Notice, however, that intentions or aims of participants are only considered at the very last stage: only if none of the additional features of participation (rules 4–7) is available are explicit expressions considered. Obviously, these intentions and aims are usually highly interesting aspects of political phenomena, but we do not need them to depict most forms of political participation. Ockham’s razor should be used whenever possible. By organizing the crucial criteria hierarchically (see the order of the five gray decision lozenges in Figure 1 ), concluding whether a feature is available becomes increasingly complicated. Positively formulated, this means that phenomena such as casting a vote, contacting a politician, or organizing a budget forum can be identified as forms of political participation straightforwardly. Only after these uncomplicated forms are dealt with are more difficult criteria considered.

Figure 1. A conceptual map of political participation.

Principally, there is no reason to restrict the application of rule 8 to activities that could not be categorized under the minimalist, targeted, or contextual definitions. Although the intentions and aims of the people involved are not necessary for defining the first four types of participation, that does not exclude teleological aspects for further refinements of these concepts. Following the distinctions proposed by Hay ( 2007 , pp. 74–75), each type of political participation can be divided into “political” or “nonpolitical” activities depending on whether the activists are primarily motivated by political or by nonpolitical aims or intentions, respectively. For example, people can attend a demonstration as an opportunity to find a partner for the rest of the weekend or they can cast a vote to help some acquaintance get elected. Downs ( 1957 ) famously excluded casting a vote for Party B instead of the preferred Party A from his concept of “rational behavior” if for some voter “preventing his wife’s tantrums is more important to him than having A win instead of B” (p. 7). By using this argument, for instance, for modes of participation covered by the minimalist definition, we arrive at the two variants of voting by the Downsian citizen: a politically motivated form for those who base their vote for Party A on their political preferences, and a nonpolitical form for those who prefer Party A, but vote for B to avoid further conflicts at home. Although these last forms of nonpolitical participation provide an interesting case for the study of participation and democracy (van Deth, 2014 , pp. 359–360), they do not establish a distinct variant of political participation and are therefore not included in Figure 1 .

Conclusions

What is political participation? Due to the rapid expansion of political activities over the last few decades and the spread of expressive modes, this question has become increasingly difficult to answer and has resulted in many disputes in this area. Are civic engagement or political consumerism types of political participation? Are intentions required to define political participation? What is gained by distinguishing between “politics” and “the political?” Is online “clictivism” participation? And so on. Basically, these debates concern terminological matters confused by an apparently strong faith in nominal definitions. Instead of starting another round of these discussions, this article has developed a set of decision rules that offer, as Hempel suggested, “objective criteria” for deciding whether the term political participation applies to some phenomenon. In this way, the question “What is political participation?” is converted into the more pragmatic question: How would you recognize a form of political participation when you saw one? Answering this last question allows for the methodical identification of any phenomenon as a specimen of political participation and for a systematic distinction between various types of participation.

The advantages of using an operational definition, however, come with a price: instead of obtaining a single, overarching definition of political participation we end up with a set of variants. Because the continuous expansion of the repertoire of political participation and especially the rise of expressive forms implies the use of nonpolitical activities in political circumstances, these newer forms of participation could be covered by a single definition only if such a conceptualization, quite literally, covered everything (van Deth, 2001 ). Yet social, societal, and political developments in democratic societies have made the search for a single encompassing definition of political participation obsolete. To secure analytical clarity and empirical feasibility, the conceptual map developed here results in the depiction of a set of clear-cut modes of political participation. Together, these broad variants and distinct modes systematically and efficiently cover the whole range of forms of political participation: a minimalist definition is developed first and four additional variants are based only on the availability of indispensable additional features. 5 More aspects can be taken into account—legality, legitimacy, effectiveness, nonviolence, internet use, and so on—but they are not necessary for the conceptualization of political participation. Furthermore, the five variants offer a comprehensive conceptualization of political participation without excluding future innovations, which are the hallmark of a vibrant democracy.

More than a century ago Max Weber discussed concept formation in a rapidly changing world. Scientific progress, he argued, has it origin in the “constant tension” between “the intellectual apparatus which the past has developed” and the “new knowledge which we can and desire to wrest from reality” (Weber, 1949 , p. 105, emphasis original). The continuous expansion of the repertoire of political participation undoubtedly has boosted the “tensions” between scholars relying on clear-cut definitions of political participation but missing new developments in their analyses on the one hand, and those who are primarily interested in new developments but lack a clear conceptualization of their main object on the other. Weber considered such developments as unavoidable and stressed that “concept-construction depends on the setting of the problem” ( 1949 , p. 105). In participation research, this “setting” consists of the (functioning of) democratic societies. The conceptualization of political participation, then, should be continuously attuned to changes in democratic societies. If the repertoire of political participation expands continuously, only a corresponding expansion of the concept of political participation will allow us to satisfy the desire to wrest more knowledge from reality about the way democracy functions.

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1. A typical example of such ambivalent conclusions of empirical analyses is: “while manifest, formal and extra-parliamentary political participation are declining . . . it might still be possible that this analysis is missing other important forms of political participation” (Boarini & Díaz, 2015 , p. 28). Unless these “other important forms” are taken into account, nothing can be concluded about the quality of democracy.

2. This section contains a modified version of my “Conceptual Map of Political Participation” published earlier (van Deth, 2014 ). An extensive discussion of the map and an empirical application can be found in Theocharis and van Deth ( 2018a , 2018b ). Empirical applications are also provided by Ohme et al. ( 2018 ) and Steenvoorden ( 2018 ).

3. Definitions are “minimal” if they “deliberatively focus on the smallest possible number of attributes that are still seen as producing a viable standard” (Collier & Levitsky, 1997 , p. 433).

4. I am indebted to Yannis Theocharis for drawing my attention to this variant of political participation and for his suggestion to add an additional rule to the initial map (see also Theocharis, 2015 ).

5. In addition, every specific form of participation can be unambiguously and efficiently defined by enumerating the yes/no responses to the eight rules (see van Deth, 2014 , p. 354; Theocharis & van Deth, 2018b , pp. 77–81).

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Annual Review of Political Science

Volume 25, 2022, review article, open access, education and political participation.

• Claire Willeck 1 , and Tali Mendelberg 1
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA; email: [email protected] [email protected]
• Vol. 25:89-110 (Volume publication date May 2022) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051120-014235
• First published as a Review in Advance on December 08, 2021
• Copyright © 2022 by Annual Reviews. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information

Whether education affects political participation is a long-standing and central question in political philosophy and political science. In this review, we provide an overview of the three main theoretical models that explain different causal pathways. We then synthesize the surge in research using causal inference strategies and show that this literature has generated mixed results about the causal impact of education, even when using similar methods and data. These findings do not provide clear support for any of the three theories. Our next section covers research on civic education and political participation. The quantity of civic education matters little for political participation, but how civic education is taught does matter. Namely, strategies falling under the rubric of active learning show promise. These strategies seem especially effective for historically marginalized students. Our final section calls for more research on how civic education is taught.

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Contemporary Political Participation Research: A Critical Assessment

• First Online: 01 January 2012

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• Iasonas Lamprianou 2  

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This chapter investigates and analyses contemporary research regarding political participation. An extensive discussion on different conceptualizations and definitions of political participation is presented, raising the issue pertaining to the distinction between conventional and unconventional political participation and showing why this distinction is largely artificial and to a certain extent elusive. To facilitate our discussion about extreme and violent political participation activities (as they are described in contemporary research), frequent references are drawn to perceptions of the ancient Athenians as regards the roles and civil duties as citizens within their community, showing that these duties did not necessarily distinguish between different types of participation. The chapter makes further theoretical suggestions for future, pointing out the useful synergy between sociological research and political science analysis.

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Lamprianou, I. (2013). Contemporary Political Participation Research: A Critical Assessment. In: Demetriou, K. (eds) Democracy in Transition. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30068-4_2

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Political participation and three theories of democracy: A research inventory and agenda

2006, European Journal of Political Research

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Political participation is an often claimed value in the political and scientific discourse, but it is not always clearly defined. This article tries to concretise the qualities of political participation by the introduction of a four-fold classification inspired by, and based on Ruut Veenhoven's model of the "four qualities of life". In this classification it is argued that political participation contributes on the one hand to the quality of democracy (outer qualities) and on the other hand to the individuals' feeling of self-determination and political freedom (inner qualities). Furthermore, different forms of participation are discussed in respect to their impact on these inner and outer qualities. Finally, indicators for each of the qualities are identified, described and critically discussed.

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What is youth political participation literature review on youth political participation and political attitudes.

• Institute of Political Science, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

Looking at political participation behavior of young adults in contemporary Europe, this paper provides the reader with a map of different terminologies and logics that are used to discuss youth political participation. The existing literature is examined through the lens of five guiding questions: what defines youth political participation? How does youth political participation differ from adult political participation? How do young adults develop political attitudes? How does youth political participation differ across Europe? What methods are being used to analyze youth political participation? For those researching youth political participation for the first time, this paper offers a useful overview of the topic. At the same time, it gives researchers who are already well-informed the opportunity to reflect on the current state of research in this field. Finally, this paper indicates where future research is needed.

1. Introduction

Looking at the political participation behavior of young adults in contemporary Europe, one is faced with a contradiction. Representatives of the disengagement paradigm within the literature underpin their argument with empirical findings, such as young adults being the least likely to vote in national elections, the drop of youth membership in political parties, and generally low levels of political interest. On the other hand, the literature on an engagement paradigm of youth participation represents a more optimistic view as it is based on findings in the context of new forms of political participation, which are more appealing to and are used more frequently by young adults.

Both perspectives raise questions about the role of young adults in European democracies. The two mentioned positions represent the respective end points of a much more nuanced line of research on this topic. Research in this area can appear confusing, but overall it is clear that a comprehensive picture of both the degree and the modes of youth political participation is lacking. This paper tries to take a first step in the direction of addressing this problem. The goal is to provide the reader with a map of the different terminologies and logics that are used to discuss youth political participation. To attain this goal, this paper presents insights from the existing literature on the following guiding questions:

❖ What defines political participation?

❖ How does youth political participation differ from adult political participation?

❖ How do young adults develop political attitudes?

❖ How does youth political participation differ across Europe?

❖ What methods are being used to analyze youth political participation?

The first step is to provide a structured inventory. On the one hand, this paper will be helpful for those encountering this research area for the first time as it provides an overview of the previous research in the field of youth political participation in Europe. On the other, it offers well-informed researchers the opportunity to reflect on the current state of research in this field. In addition, this paper clearly points toward where further research is needed.

With this in mind, I develop three main arguments within this paper. First, although existing definitions of political participation are adequate to capture youth participation, the current literature is inconsistent in the inclusion of new modes of participation that are increasingly common among young adults. Second, there are both methodological and substantive problems within the existing literature, which emerge from young adults' different conceptions of politics as well as from their differing awareness to adults of what constitutes political participation. Third, and resulting from this, the current state of research in this area lacks larger cross-national studies that take into account an adequate conception of how the youth define political participation and that conduct comparative research on youth political participation behavior, which is necessary if we agree that young people hold the key for the future functioning of our political systems ( Hooghe et al., 2004 ).

The rest of this paper is structured as follows. The next section gives an overview of the development of political participation research. In doing so, it includes a review of the definitions of political participation then and now and clarifies why it is important to be familiar with those definitions when looking at the political participation behavior of young adults. The following section deals with the (potential) differences between the political participation behavior of young adults and adults. Besides an overview of the ongoing debate on whether and, if so, what kind of differences there are, this chapter clearly indicates which role the question of measurement plays in this. The fourth section focuses on the political attitudes of young adults after reviewing political socialization research, for political socialization plays an important role in the formation of the political attitudes of young adults. After this, section 5 gives an overview of youth political participation across Europe. Section 6 then presents methods previously used in the context of youth political participation. As usual, the final section summarizes the previous sections and highlights which questions remain unanswered. It thereby tries to provide an answer to the question of youth political participation as it actually is and indicates where future research is needed.

2. The Development of Political Participation Repertoires and Research

Political Participation research has undergone significant developments over the course of the last few decades. Multiple disciplines have contributed to broadening our understanding of the field, but because of this multidisciplinary input it has become less clear what the underlying core assumptions and definitions are that make up the term Political Participation (PP). This section therefore sketches the development of the term and answers the core question of what defines political participation.

Signing a petition, joining a party, or casting a vote are the most commonly accepted actions deemed as PP. But that's about as far as agreements go. To answer the question of how PP can be defined, one has to go back a few decades. In 1973, Robert Dahl offered a first glimpse of what it might mean. In “Poliarchy: Participation and Opposition” he declares PP an essential part of modern democracies as it enables citizens to hold their governments accountable ( Dahl, 1973 ). However, Dahl didn't explicitly define his concept of participation. His definition only implicitly covered actions within the given institutional framework of a nation, meaning that actions such as consumerism ( Stolle et al., 2005 ) or just hitting a “like” button wouldn't be categorized as participation, even though they could be seen as holding governments accountable. His works nevertheless contain some fundamental elements of our modern conception of PP—namely accountability as well as the dichotomy of private citizens and professional politicians, which can also be found in the well acknowledged works of Verba and Nie (1972) .

To these researchers, political participation is “ those activities by private citizens that are more or less directly aimed at influencing the selection of governmental personnel and/or the actions they take” ( Verba and Nie, 1972 , p. 2). According to Verba and Nie, private citizens have the ability to participate in politics not just by casting votes or joining parties but through numerous other activities. Their suggested typology consists of voting, campaign activity, contacting public officials, and cooperative or communal activities.

This definition has paved the way for the analysis of actions such as protests, strikes, or petitions as activities that participate in politics through other means than elections ( Verba and Nie, 1972 , p. 47). Similar concepts have been presented by Parry et al. (1992) or Pattie et al. (2004) , who, in contrast to Verba and Nie (1972) , stress that political participation does not necessarily have to address governments but could also target other institutions or even organizations. PP can therefore affect the policymaking process as well as services provided by governments, such as education or health care ( Pattie et al., 2004 ; Fox, 2014 ). Brady (1998) adds that, in order to qualify as PP, actions taken by private citizens must be observable, manifest, and voluntary, but he also focuses on interactions between citizens and political elites.

Parallel to developments in participation-research, authors such as Flanagan (2013) , Norris (2002) , Putnam (2001) , Zukin et al. (2006) , or Daskalopoulou (2018) have been working on the concept of civic engagement, which has several intersections with PP research. The concept of civic engagement has been used to analyze all kinds of citizen behavior, including activities and actions, which can but don't necessarily have to be political. Putnam's “bowling alone,” e.g., also includes going to a bowling alley as a vital indicator of engagement. The ever-growing repertoire of indicators has therefore led to accusations of conceptual stretching ( Berger, 2009 ), meaning that the conception is too broad and therefore not suitable for researchers. Most authors' conceptions of PP from the first period of research have three aspects in common: Actions have to be taken by private citizens, not politicians; these actions have to be voluntary, meaning structural forces that require citizens to take certain actions wouldn't count as participation; and their actions need to target governments, institutions, organizations or NGOs. These three aspects are at the “ hard core” ( Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970 ) of almost every single contemporary definition of PP.

van Deth (2001) nicely summarizes the evolution of political participation repertoires between the 1940s and the 1990s by tracing the publication of landmark studies. In the 1940s and 1950s, PP was mainly restricted to voting and campaign activities. In the early 1960s, though, appeared the later so-called “conventional” modes of PP. At this time, “ political participation was broadly understood as activities concerned with traditional conceptualizations of politics as campaigning by politicians and parties, and with well-accepted contacts between citizens and public officials” ( van Deth, 2001 , p. 5). During the 1970s, these conventional forms were expanded and “unconventional” forms, which were not in line with the societal norms of the 1970s, appeared. These unconventional forms included, among others, protest and rejection as well as new social movements, such as women's or pacifist movements ( van Deth, 2001 ). Later, in the 1990s, the borderline between the political and non-political spheres of modern society disappeared as the political participation repertoire came to include “civil” activities such as volunteering and social engagement ( van Deth, 2001 ). Nowadays, further forms of PP have emerged and challenge PP research. The new forms use non-political behavior to express political opinions, and what was once defined as unconventional or elite-challenging is now commonplace. Therefore, these forms can no longer be captured by a distinction between conventional and unconventional PP ( Teorell et al., 2007 ). Furthermore, García-Albacete (2014) has found that citizens' political involvement has changed recently and argues that these changes characterize today's PP repertoire and have led to the distinction between institutionalized and non-institutionalized PP. First, “ the agencies or structures through which citizens are mobilized and participate have (…) been transformed, with the spread of new social movements and advocacy networks ” ( García-Albacete, 2014 , p. 15). Second, individualized patterns of participation are growing as ties to political and civic organizations become weaker ( García-Albacete, 2014 ). The now widely used distinction between institutionalized and non-institutionalized PP capture forms of PP which happen within the institutional framework (e.g., voting or party membership) and those which happen outside of the institutional framework (e.g., protest or boycotting). This distinction between institutionalized and non-institutionalized PP is particularly important for any kind of research on youth participation, given the fact that young adults are disproportionately more likely to participate through non-institutionalized means.

Adapting to or being challenged by new forms of participation is a continuous process. One of the more recent developments in this regard is online participation. The debate about how and if online participation fits into existing concepts is ongoing and vibrant ( Gibson and Cantijoch, 2013 ; Dayican, 2014 ; Halupka, 2014 ; Kristofferson et al., 2014 ). Authors such as Morozov (2009) declare it as an illusion of participation, whereas Rojas and Puig-i-Abril (2009) see it as “ expressive participation” which constitutes a “ subdimension” ( Rojas and Puig-i-Abril, 2009 , p. 907) of political participation. Because of this heated debate and the numerous ways of integrating online participation into existing forms of participation, Theocharis (2015) warns that the entire concept of PP could face a risk of overstretching.

In order to avoid this fate, van Deth (2014) has offered a distinct concept of PP, which should enable researchers to “ recognize a mode of participation if [they] see one” ( van Deth, 2014 , p. 5). In order to “ see one,” researchers should look for these characteristics of participation: it is an activity; it is voluntary and not ordered by a ruling class or required by law; it refers to people in their role as non-professionals or amateurs; and it concerns government, politics, or the state ( van Deth, 2014 ). This description represents the minimum definition to which further variants are added, namely “ two additional variants based on the target (politics/government/state or problems/community), and two based on circumstantial evidence (contextual and motivational)” ( Theocharis and van Deth, 2018a , p. 81). This conceptual map results in five analytically unambiguous modes of political participation ( Theocharis and van Deth, 2018a ). Thus, the first form (minimal definition) focuses on the arena of participation rather than its outcomes, while the second and third forms deal with the targets of the activities rather than relying on the goals or intentions of the people. In the fourth form, the political nature of the activities is based on contextual evidence, and only at the very last stage (form five) are the intentions/aims of the participants considered in order to identify a form of political participation. The authors therefore illustrate that “ the advantage of following these decision rules is not only that we can distinguish between political acts that fit into definitions with stricter or loser requirements, but also that we can systematically exclude those who do not meet the definitional requirements” ( Theocharis and van Deth, 2018b ). Based on this concept, online PP could be recognized as a form of PP. However, this example also reveals that PP cannot be defined in a simple way, which is also reflected in the existing literature. Instead, it raises the question of whether a definition such as the one by van Deth does permit the development of means for unifying the existing discussion. At the same time, such a broad and yet clearly defined definition offers the possibility of being able to classify forms newly emerging in the literature. In the course of ever-changing social situations and behaviors, this seems to be a key aspect of developing a definition of PP, which can be used over the long term.

3. Differences Between Youth and Adult Political Participation

The previous section has already shown that there is no need for a separate definition of youth political participation; instead, the various forms of political participation used by young adults is of central importance. Following this, the question arises as to what extent the PP behavior of young adults differs from that of other groups. A look at the previous research shows a perceived gap between young adult and adults. Many studies show the lowest scores in almost all areas of political participation for young adults and thus the image emerges that young people are not sufficiently engaged in politics. This perception is based upon trends such as voting in elections, where young adults have the lowest rates, and these rates continue to decrease just as the level of youth membership in political parties is decreasing ( Kimberlee, 2002 ; Hooghe et al., 2004 ; Fieldhouse et al., 2007 ; Cross and Young, 2008 ). To capture young people's disengagement in politics, it can be said that “ young people are less concerned with politics, less politically knowledgeable, do not participate in social or political activities, are more apathetic, and have low levels of political interest” ( Quintelier, 2007 , p. 165). Even if this representation seems clear, the disengagement of young adults in politics remains a contested issue in the literature. At this point, three central questions need to be clarified. First, is there a real difference between the political participation behavior of young adults and adults? Second, which factors lead to a different behavior between young and old? Third, does this really mean that young adults are politically disengaged?

The first, and to some authors most important, reason for differences between youth and adult political participation is lifecycle. Here, one can find a curvilinear effect of age, which means that participation rises from youth until middle age, then decreases with old age. Scholars have been researching this trend for decades ( Jennings, 1979 ), and it must be clearly differentiated between lifecycle effects and generational effects. In the context of lifecycle effects, what matters is the increase or decrease of political participation resulting from different stages of life ( Nie et al., 1974 ).

In this sense, political participation is nobody's priority as it competes against more pressing personal concerns, especially for young people ( Highton and Wolfinger, 2001 ). As people have a finite amount of time, engagement with politics is more costly for those who have not yet sorted out their lives (ibid.). In addition to the fact that young adults gain more experience with the electoral and political process as they age, some specific steps of adulthood have proven to have an effect on political participation behavior. These include, among others, settling down, marriage ( Stoker and Jennings, 1995 ), graduating and getting a job. Some authors state that these results relate purely to the influence on voting turnout and that the influence of lifecycle effects on other forms of political participation can only explain minor differences ( Quintelier, 2007 ). However, not all researchers share this view. Research in the area of non-institutionalized participation shows that lifecycle effects are also relevant here. Specifically, they concern personal availability and refer to “ the absence of personal constraints that may increase the costs and risks of movement participation, such as full-time employment, marriage, and family responsibilities” ( McAdam, 1986 , p. 70). The social movement research shows relevant influences on young adults, in the sense that the absence of these kinds of constraints facilitates their participation ( Beyerlein and Hipp, 2006 ; Saunders et al., 2012 ; Earl et al., 2017 ).

The theory of generation effects is based on the assumption that pre-adult socialization exerts enduring effects on political socialization. In this sense, the adolescence of each individual is the period relevant for the development of political thinking. Building on this argument, some authors assume that as today's young adults are less active, they will never reach the level of political participation of the current elderly ( Martikainen et al., 2005 ). One explanation for this is that young adults today are having more difficulty in reaching the milestones of adulthood ( Arnett, 2014 ; Tagliabue et al., 2014 ) and that this results in an irreversible delay in political participation. Studies show that young adults retain these characteristics that distinguish them from previous generations and that this will lead to a replacement of the current electorate by a more passive generation of political participants ( Quintelier, 2007 ).

Another reason for the perceived different behavior between the age groups derives from the varying definitions of the political or of political behavior. Every researcher needs to base his or her research on a clear definition. At the same time, this definition of the political or what is defined as political participation must also be used and accepted by the survey population. This is exactly where differences between young adults and adults emerge. Do young adults and adults view the same activities as political? Generally, studies show a difference between the definitions of researchers and survey participants. For example, Parry et al. (1992) found that only 18% of their survey participants interpreted a list of activities as political, which the researchers also defined as political. For this reason, some researchers call for a broader definition, which would lead to higher noted levels of political engagement (e.g., Roker et al., 1999 ). The definition question is also relevant when thinking of non-institutionalized forms of political participation. Young adults might not define their actions as political, even though they are actually political. Therefore, it is both about the individual's conception of politics/the political as well as their awareness of doing something political. Only a few studies focus on young adults' definition of the political, but they show that young adults use a narrower definition than both researchers and adults (e.g., Bynner and Ashford, 1994 ; Andolina et al., 2002 ). This results in young adults being less interested than adults in politics, because they do not view politics, in their narrow definition, as relevant to their lives ( Andolina et al., 2002 ). In this sense, “ the low political participation rate among youth is a by-product of their narrow conception of politics and their impression that politicians do not truly care about their needs” ( Quintelier, 2007 , p. 169). Hence, youth disengagement is a result of the organization of politics rather than of the youth's own lack of interest. For this reason, research is growing on how young adults define political participation and what they perceive as political participation ( Henn et al., 2002 , 2005 ; O'Toole, 2003 ; O'Toole et al., 2003a ). They show that previous studies used a concept of participation that is too narrow and that, e.g., the topic of non-participation as an act of political action has so far not been sufficiently addressed ( O'Toole, 2003 ).

Finally, a study by Quintelier (2007) , which specifically examined the differences between the age groups, revealed that young adults and adults seem to be similar in their political attitudes, with the exception that young people have fewer opportunities to participate politically. Furthermore, they state that there are differences with regard to the engagement in specific forms of political participation as young adults tend to participate more in non-institutionalized forms. This leads to the conclusion that “ it seems as if the problem of youth political participation is less a matter of whether they participate, and more a matter of where they participate” ( Rainsford, 2017 , p. 2).

4. Political Attitudes of the Youth

Just like the research on political participation, contributions to the field of political attitudes have also broadened our understanding of how political attitudes develop and how the political attitudes of young adults differ from those of adults. This section takes the different approaches to socialization and the debated inputs from other fields and focuses on development, maturation, and the stability of attitudes in order to answer how young adults develop political attitudes.

Hyman (1959 , p. 25) thought of political socialization as an individual's “(…) learning of social patterns corresponding to his societal positions as mediated through various agencies of society .” Considering that it is one of the most commonly used definitions of political socialization, it is surprising that researchers had mostly analyzed family influence first and foremost and neglected various agencies of society. Furthermore, Sapiro (2004) points out that, in its early days, dedicated research on political socialization ( Easton et al., 1969 ; Searing et al., 1973 ; Jennings and Niemi, 1974 ) mostly focused on shared party affiliations, participation in voluntary organizations, or the genuine political interest of children and their parents' possible influence on it. However, scholars have repeatedly faced the same methodological challenge, since young children do not possess many issue beliefs at all ( Searing et al., 1973 ). This makes it hard to identify inferences valuable to political science. Hess and Torney-Purta (1967) , on the other hand, claim that children are able to express political opinions and partisanship. This uncertainty caused researchers ( Hanks, 1981 ; Percheron and Jennings, 1981 ; Nieuwbeerta and Wittebrood, 1995 ) to shift their focal point toward adolescents and young adults instead of children, because their issue beliefs could be accessed more easily due to the wider scope of methods available for gathering data. The driving force behind socialization research until now has been a biologically sound core assumption: The neurological structure, senso-motoric skills, as well as temperament, reactivity, semantic networks and behavior of infants and adolescents differs from adults ( Kagan, 2003 , p. 6–8). Dollard and Miller (1950) argue that this difference slowly deteriorates through learning because “ human behavior is learned” ( Dollard and Miller, 1950 , p. 25).

In the “ heyday” ( Niemi and Hepburn, 2010 , p. 10; van Deth et al., 2011 , p. 48) of political socialization research the Columbia school ( Berelson et al., 1954 ; Butler and Stokes, 1974 ) and Michigan School ( Campbell et al., 1960 ; Easton et al., 1969 ) dominated the discourse. Both schools found that political affiliation and attitudes toward institutions and the authorities strongly correlate with whatever interests one's parents had and that these interests didn't change much over the span of a lifetime. Socialization research was equal to research on preference or opinion inheritance; almost all research focused exclusively on the United States and also suffered from selection biases as they mostly included white middle-class Americans. Niemi and Sobieszek (1977) note that this bias was compensated for mainly by Abramson (1977) and García (1973 ), who tried to answer why people of color feel less politically efficacious throughout multiple generations. Researchers posed interesting questions but couldn't identify any causal mechanisms. Clarke (1978) and Percheron and Jennings (1981) dissected differences between American and French families, concluding that “ (…) the object of partisan socialization within the family is country specific” ( Percheron and Jennings, 1981 , p. 434), which remains true today.

However, political socialization is not only country specific; it also depends on the respective political context. This raises the question of generational dependency, i.e., if it makes a difference whether young adults themselves or their parents have been socialized in a specific political context. The various studies on this question reveal that political socialization is influenced by the broader context both during one's own political socialization ( Grasso et al., 2019 ) and during the transmission from parents to children. In this way, researchers have shown that “ if parents are politically engaged and frequently discuss politics with the child, transmission rates rise substantially, particularly on topics of general political significance and salience” ( Jennings et al., 2009 ). Here, regular political events, as well as more episodic events, offer socialization opportunities for parents ( Valentino and Sears, 1998 ).

Furthermore, Jennings (1984) demonstrated that socialization can also be observed through social class and not just the direct transmission from parents to their children. This made a multitude of arguments part of the socialization process. According to Niemi and Hepburn (1995) , up until the 1990s research had been suffering from two flawed implicit assumptions: Political attitudes, opinions and assumptions of today remain mostly the same tomorrow, and early learning is more important than learning in later life. Instead, they argue that adolescents' attitudes do change, often substantially, and do not necessarily settle just because they turned 18 and/or moved out. Only emerging longitudinal studies ( Hanks, 1981 ; Alwin and Krosnick, 1991 ; Smith, 1999 ) made such findings possible. Niemi and Hepburn (1995) therefore demanded a revitalization of political socialization theory and research that would abandon these flawed assumptions. As if they had heard the call, Nieuwbeerta and Wittebrood (1995) challenged one of the cornerstones of socialization research: the idea of fathers being dominant in the transmission of party preferences. They found that there was a gender specific difference in the transmissions of these preferences, challenging decades of previous research. Their Dutch case showed that daughters were more likely to share their mother's party preference and sons were more likely to share their father's. With the focus on women, this influence of a mother on her daughter was also confirmed 15 years later in a Canadian context ( Gidengil et al., 2010 ). Family settings change over time and different kinds of settings—such as stay-at-home parents, patchwork or single parenting—grow in numbers, which could lead to individualization and growing issue heterogeneity ( Du Bois-Reymond et al., 2001 ; Inglehart and Welzel, 2005 ). The realization that “ (…) socialization nowadays clearly occurs under different circumstances” ( van Deth et al., 2011 , p. 148) has cast doubt on most previous findings regarding the influence of parents. Many of core assumptions of socialization theories could not be reproduced with more sophisticated methods ( Sears, 1990 ; Jennings, 2007 ), and research therefore still suffers from significant blind spots. “ The questions, methods, and assumptions have been changed by 40 years of scholarship, political experience including regime change into and out of democracy, and altered political sensibilities” ( Sapiro, 2004 , p. 19). Political socialization theory struggles to deliver on its promises:

“ correlations between parents and their (mostly) biological children, with no way of separating the effects of the environment the parents provide from the effects of the genes they provide, and no way of separating the effects of the home environment from the effects of the environment outside the home. The evidence, in other words, is ambiguous.” ( Harris, 2000 , p. 626).

Thus, it cannot only be parents who exert influence. While most researchers still assume that family has some influence, they still do not know how much of an influence that is. Other places of socialization that receive a lot of attention are the school, peers, and the media ( Blais and Carty, 1990 ). Research on the influence of school has existed for a long time, and from the beginning its results have been in the area of conflict between those who see an influence ( Himmelweit and Swift, 1969 ; Palonsky, 1987 ) and those who do not ( Hyman, 1959 ; Easton et al., 1969 ). A central problem here is the difficulty of isolating the school effect from other effects ( Banks and Roker, 1994 ). For this reason, researchers especially in more recent studies, try to keep the framework conditions constant, e.g., by looking at samples that vary only in one characteristic, such as the type of school. This should facilitate the isolation of the influence of the various factors from each other. Examples for Finland ( Koskimaa and Rapeli, 2015 ) and Belgium ( Quintelier, 2015 ) show that school has an influence, without being the most central one. Instead, in addition to family influence, the influence of peers is in the foreground. It has even been shown that “ peers, through discussion and diversity, are even more influential and successful in creating greater political participation” ( Quintelier, 2015 , p. 65) than the family. Nevertheless, the media are also assigned a relevant role here. While earlier studies dealt with the influence of different forms of media, such as television news or newspapers ( Atkin and Gantz, 1978 ; Garramore and Atkin, 1986 ), researchers have only recently begun to assess the influence of social media on the process of political socialization. The argument in relation to social media would be that they are characterized by less distinct boundaries between non-political and political activities, thereby lowering the thresholds of political engagement ( Ekström and Shehata, 2018 ). However, previous studies can only partially confirm this (ibid.). This research strand therefore requires supplementary studies.

In addition to studies on parental and other social as well as structural transmission, a branch of interdisciplinary research is steadily growing which focuses on the genetic inheritance of attitudes and norms ( Martin et al., 1986 ; Bouchard et al., 1990 ; Bouchard and McGue, 2003 ; Alford et al., 2005 ; Bell et al., 2009 ; Hatemi et al., 2011 ; Kudrnac and Lyons, 2017 ). These studies look at the development of attitudes, norms and values amongst twins or parents and their offspring either in a setting of continuous exposure to the parent/sibling or in a setting with deliberate discontinuities in their biographies. Moreover, the results appear promising: “ If father and mother both hold a highly intensive just-world belief, the probability that their child will also hold a strong belief in a just world is very high” ( Schönpflug and Bilz, 2009 , p. 229). It is important to stress that researchers also warn that most genetic association studies greatly overinterpret their findings ( Benjamin et al., 2012 ).

Beside these studies, and in the context of a more interdisciplinary view of the topic, psychologists like to refer to attitudes as “ a person's general evaluation of an object (where ‘object' is understood in a broad sense encompassing persons, events, products, policies, institutions and so on) ” ( O'Keefe, 2015 , p. 13). However, social scientists struggle with this definition as it is far too broad to operate with. Batista Foguet and Saris (1997) would argue that the outcome of the aforementioned evaluation would have to be stable over time and that it would have to be consistent with previous evaluation in order to constitute an attitude. Researchers seem to agree on the fact that the backbone of an attitude is stability ( Alwin and Krosnick, 1991 ; Wilson and Hodges, 1992 ; Zaller et al., 1992 ), even though critics argue that stability is not necessary for attitudes ( Kahneman et al., 1999 ). But what happens to evaluation during maturation? Hooghe and Wilkenfeld (2008) argue that attitude development during maturation is not the same thing as changing an attitude: “ Attitude development requires change in the quality of thinking, rather than merely change in thinking” ( Hooghe and Wilkenfeld, 2008 , p. 156). Previous authors had denied the existence of attitudes in young adults ( Marsh, 1971 ; Searing et al., 1973 ).

Because of this maturation process, the attitudes of young adults differ from those of adults in many policy fields. But what attitudes are we talking about here? “Civic culture” by Almond and Verba (1963) is often ( Galston, 2001 ; Sapiro, 2004 ; Dalton, 2008 ; Kam and Palmer, 2008 ; Quintelier and Hooghe, 2011 ; Hoskins et al., 2015 ) cited as encompassing a vital set of attitudes, including political interest and political trust, and, depending on the research design, researchers often measure civic culture by surveying interest and/or trust in politics. The stereotypical picture would be that young adults are less interested, more negative and that they don't trust political elites as such ( Quintelier, 2007 ). As Rekker et al. (2015) has shown, multiple longitudinal studies reproduce the same result: Younger cohorts are less conservative on cultural issues but not on economic issues. Two specific fields of this are ethnocentrism and egalitarianism. Furlong and Cartmel (2012) confirmed these findings as well. Young adults also appear to be less materialistic ( Rudig and Bennie, 1993 ). Alwin and Krosnick (1991) argue that the maturation process interfered with the core characteristic of attitude, namely stability. In their setting, the youngest group, whose members were aged between 18 and 25, was the least stable as far as their attitudes were concerned. Quintelier and Hooghe (2011) , on the other hand, argue that attitudes among adolescents develop early and are likely to remain stable until adulthood. Eckstein et al. (2012) found common ground between both realms and argue that most young adults agree on aspects of good citizenship such as voting, helping others or taking part in organizations. But Henn et al. (2005) point toward a difference between attitude and action in the UK as young people are less likely to vote and less likely to even register for it in the first place. Eckstein et al. (2012) also mention a key issue of the entire field:

“ (…) there is still a lack of studies explicitly investigating young people's orientations toward political behaviors over a longer period of time in order to depict development. Furthermore, longitudinal studies that did account for changes revealed no coherent pattern of results” ( Eckstein et al., 2012 , p. 491).

The scarce research shows that young people's attitudes appear to be somewhat different from those of adults. In particular, the relationship between development, maturation and the stability of one's attitudes seems to be one of the most researched topics, yet it offers only a few insights. Eckstein et al. (2012) can only be supported in their demand for more longitudinal studies in this field.

5. Differences in Youth Political Participation Across Europe

Having discussed the possible differences that exist between young adults and adults and the role that political socialization plays, the next step is to look at how young adults and their participation differ across Europe. This section aims to illustrate the diversity of participation of young adults, which has already been covered by existing research. Of course, this cannot be an exhaustive view of all existing studies. Instead, it offers a nuanced view into different regions of Europe and, together with the following section on methods, provides the basis for identifying the research gaps in this area. Generally, each of the EU-member states' polities offers distinct institutionalized ways of participating. In 26 of the 27 member states, citizens need to be at least 18 years old in order to be eligible to vote; Austria, with its active voting-age of 16, is the exception. Keeping in mind these structural differences, this overview will nevertheless look at both the institutionalized and non-institutionalized participation of young adults in different regions of Europe.

Research on Northern European countries has had a great impact on questions of association membership and its effects on political participation. Torpe (2003) indicates that, among Danish youth, membership in associations is becoming looser and that this membership don't necessarily influence the likelihood of political participation. Coe et al. (2016) took a different approach and directly surveyed 10 political activists aged between 17 and 19 in Northern Sweden. On the basis of this study, Coe et al. conceived the concept of “ Youth Politics as Multiple Processes” ( Coe et al., 2016 , p. 6), which indicates that youth political participation is characterized by very distinct restrictions such as age limits, adults' disinterest in youth-demands, and state-centered definitions of politics. Nygard et al. (2016) focused on variables deriving from “ resource models” to explain different forms of political participation amongst Finnish 9th graders and found higher rates for alternative forms of political participation among this age group, given the right socio-economic resources. Wass (2007) emphasizes this by pointing out that the concepts of family socialization alone lack explanatory power, a point which was already discussed in section 4.

Youth political Participation in Eastern European countries has so far mostly been analyzed comparatively and with a focus on the anticipated effects of previous communist regimes in those countries. Slomczynski and Shabad (1998) argued for the polish case that democratic principles can be successfully taught in school in order to avoid extreme left or right tendencies which could result from a lack of democratic experience. Roberts (2003) partly contradicts these findings, arguing that, amongst other actions, political participation amongst young adults is deeply connected to the social environment as well as structural effects. Research on 10 eastern European countries conducted by Letki (2004) has shown that, in many cases, political participation in eastern European, post-communist countries is very similar to established western democracies. Association membership and established institutions also increase the chances of political participation in post-communist countries. In addition to this, Ådnanes (2004) found that young Bulgarians with a high degree of formal education consider migrating partly because they perceive their ways of participation as restricted and are unsatisfied with their political system, thereby confirming the importance of an established institutional framework. Burean and Badescu (2014) show that similar triggers of participation can be seen at the core of the protest movements against the Romanian government in 2012, where thousands of students took to the streets to protest against their government.

Apart from these countries, some EU-Member states, namely Greece, Spain, and Portugal, have been severely hit by the financial crisis and have also been suffering from a high degree of youth unemployment ( Tosun et al., 2019 ), which appears to go hand in hand with decreasing institutionalized and increasing non-institutionalized forms of political participation among young adults. As a result of this crisis and its severe effects on young adults, the research on southern European countries has, e.g., and beside other forms of political participation ( Sloam, 2014 ), provided valuable insights into youth political participation online. Online participation is genuinely perceived as less costly and therefore more easily accessible even during times of crisis, which is when Pacheco and Plutzer (2008) expect decreasing levels of participation. Espinar-Ruiz and Gonzalez-Rio (2015) as well as Calenda and Meijer (2009) have shown through large-N surveys that there is a significant relation between multiple forms of political participation and time spent on the internet. Theocharis (2011) research on Greece partly contradicts these findings. He argues that while the online realm is more likely to cultivate a post materialist mindset, it is also the case that this mindset seems to go hand in hand with a genuine disinterest in political participation. In addition to research on online participation, the financial crisis has granted remarkable insights into the relation of neoliberal policies and informal youth political participation ( Sotiris, 2010 ; Sakellaropoulos, 2012 ; Zamponi and Gonzalez, 2017 ). This also applies to extremist positions ( Koronaiou et al., 2015 ), showing that neoliberal policies often serve as the initial spark of protest or extremism, even though they do not represent the actual underlying cause.

Much like the research on northern European cases, research in central and Western Europe has significantly contributed to our knowledge of similarities between European nations in the forms of participation and political attitudes. These comparative studies ( Timmerman, 2009 ; Cammaerts et al., 2014 ) show similarities in the participation of Europe's adolescents. Cammaerts et al. (2014) found that insufficient participation in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Austria, Finland, and Hungary is due to the existing structural nature of the political systems and its discourse as adolescents mainly feel excluded from it. Within her research on municipalities in the UK and the Netherlands, Timmerman (2009) found that neither country offers enough entry points for young adults to contribute or participate in debates or the democratic process in general. Hooghe and Stolle (2003) found that adolescents in Germany, France and the UK are less likely to vote or participate through institutionalized means than adults, though their willingness to participate through non-institutionalized means is proportionally higher. Hooghe et al. (2004) and Quintelier and Hooghe (2011) also find this to be true for the Belgian case.

Previous research thus reveals a wealth of different forms of participation among young adults in Europe. The studies focused on very different areas, from membership in associations or voting behavior to political activism, e.g., in the form of protest. Here, young adults are exposed to different contexts, as, e.g., the case of Eastern Europe with many post-communist countries shows. The results of the studies also show which new spaces young adults use for participation and that participating in “older” spaces or institutionalized forms of participation can be problematic for them.

6. Previously Used Methods to Study Youth Political Participation

In this final step, the focus is on how and with which methods youth political participation has been investigated so far. In the past, some authors addressed one of the central questions—namely how young adults perceive and define politics and political participation—and developed tools for assessing youth definitions of politics. These consisted, e.g., of a three-year qualitative longitudinal study ( Lister et al., 2003 ) and a quantitative survey ( Vromen, 2003 ) of young adults and their perceptions of citizenship or of qualitative focus group studies that examined young adults' understanding of political engagement ( Pontes et al., 2018 ). Researchers also tried to get closer to the “vocabulary” of young adults with regard to political participation ( O'Toole, 2003 ; O'Toole et al., 2003a , b ).

Furthermore, a number of recent research projects have analyzed youth political participation. They mostly used a cross-national comparative design combined with a mixed methods approach to emphasize different focal points. Within the YOUNEX (Youth unemployment and exclusion in Europe, Lorenzini and Giugni, 2012 ) project, e.g., researchers shed light on the consequences of long-term unemployment for youth political participation by both conducting in-depth interviews and original survey data. The EURYKA (Reinventing democracy in Europe: Youth doing politics in times of increasing inequalities, Kousis and Giugni, 2019 ) project, meanwhile, conducted both panel survey analysis and biographical analysis to investigate how inequalities are experienced by young adults and how these conditions can stimulate youth political participation. A third project worth mentioning here is EUYOUPART (Political Participation of Young People in Europe, Spannring et al., 2008 ), which was specifically concerned with the development of comparatively usable indicators that would facilitate the study of youth political participation. Here, three key points were identified that may limit the comparative usability of indicators. These limitations can stem from “ failed or inaccurate translations of central terms used in a question, different opportunity structures in the countries that facilitate or hamper a form of activity or different political cultures that embed an activity in a different institutional context” ( Ogris and Westphal, 2005 ). The importance of such an approach was also shown by later investigations using existing survey datasets. García-Albacete (2014) , e.g., used data from the European Social Survey to show that indicators need to be tested for their usability both across countries and age groups.

When looking at the development of research on the political participation of young adults, the first thing that emerges is a clearly positive trend. Older studies mostly focused on establishing how adolescents are different from their adult counterparts in a descriptive manner. These studies therefore described youth participation behavior ex negativo in almost all designs. This begs the question of whether there is more to adolescents than just being non-adult. More recent studies have shown this to be the case and now hardly use this exclusive approach of comparison between young and old. Nevertheless, three points arise from this and the previous section that have so far received insufficient attention. First, recent studies do not always take into account our existing knowledge on the 'vocabulary' of young adults. At this point, it would also be worth discussing whether the existing knowledge is even sufficient or whether newer and updated studies are needed, since the possible fields of participation are constantly developing. Secondly, there is a lack of large cross-national studies that take several different contexts into account and thus explore how young adults resemble each other in their participation behavior or do not. Third, with few exceptions, the use of existing survey data sets not designed for young adults has so far paid insufficient attention to the suitability of the items used/developed for the study of young adult participation behavior.

7. Conclusion—What is Youth Political Participation?

This review article pursued several goals, among which were to give an overview of the landscape of definitions of the term political participation and to work out the specific features of youth political participation. Furthermore, it aimed to shed light on the state of youth political participation in the European context and the methods previously used to investigate this, in order to be able to identify gaps in the literature and to suggest avenues for further research.

In the first step, it became clear that the decades-long debate on the definition of political participation has produced many small-scale definitions. The (few) broader definitions seem to be more helpful, even when considering that there is no independent definition of youth political participation. Although these recent definitions of political participation are adequate for capturing youth political participation, the current literature is inconsistent in the inclusion of new modes of participation that are increasingly common among younger generations. Resulting from this one major shortcoming is the fact that non-participation has not yet been problematized adequately. Although this issue was addressed a long time ago ( O'Toole, 2003 ), it is still the case that research so far has paid little careful attention to this ( Theocharis and van Deth, 2018b ). This results in the danger of more frequent support of the disengagement thesis, which does not necessarily correspond to the actual participation situation of young adults.

In the second step, this paper sought to answer the question of how youth political participation differs from adult political participation. In general, it was shown that existing differences are interpreted differently by researchers (engagement vs. disengagement thesis). In addition, it also became apparent that the classic research design of comparing young and old, which was mainly used in older studies, is used less frequently in more recent studies. This is due to the existence of differences between what young adults define as “political” and what researchers define and interrogate as such. These definitions can differ not only between young adults and researchers, but also between young adults and adults. Inconsequently, problems can emerge from young adults' varying conceptions of politics and the “political” as well as from their differing awareness to adults of what constitutes a political act. Although some researchers tried to solve this problem by conducting research to get closer to the “vocabulary” used by young adults ( O'Toole, 2003 ; O'Toole et al., 2003a , b ), youth-specific explanations of what being politically engaged really means remain insufficient ( Pontes et al., 2018 ). This results in a clear call for future research: It is necessary to develop further youth-specific explanations and definitions of what political participation means, which new studies should then employ accordingly. This aspect of youth-adequate definitions and measurements must also be considered when using existing datasets.

Another, third major shortcoming is the lack of larger cross-national studies that take into account a youth-adequate definition of political participation and conduct research on the political participation behavior of youths. This certainly results from the absence of a unified theoretical foundation for studying “European” youth political participation. This is unfortunate considering the enormous amount of data available, especially from the EU. In addition, implications for European policy research can only be made on the basis of cross-country consistent studies.

In conclusion, it can be said that the definition of youth political participation is currently nothing more than general political participation. However, the question remains regarding the use of forms of political participation by young adults. Hopefully, this article will trigger other researchers to spend more time on this topic and both to resolve the mismatch between the definition of political participation and the perception of young adults regarding what is “political” and to review existing and upcoming datasets so that they can scrutinize this concept.

Author Contributions

JW conceived and designed the article, wrote the manuscript, revised the manuscript, reread it, and finally approved the submitted version.

This article benefited from financial support by the project Change through Crisis? Solidarity and Desolidarization in Germany and Europe (Solikris; Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany), the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and Arts and Heidelberg University.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments. The author gratefully acknowledges the comments from Jale Tosun and all other members of the project team in Heidelberg. Marcel Katzlinger deserves credit for his research assistance and comments on previous versions of the paper. Finally, the author thanks Laurence Crumbie for language editing.

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Keywords: political participation, political attitudes, youth, overview, literature review

Citation: Weiss J (2020) What Is Youth Political Participation? Literature Review on Youth Political Participation and Political Attitudes. Front. Polit. Sci. 2:1. doi: 10.3389/fpos.2020.00001

Received: 18 February 2020; Accepted: 20 April 2020; Published: 15 May 2020.

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Copyright © 2020 Weiss. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Julia Weiss, julia.weiss@ipw.uni-heidelberg.de

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