Youth Political Participation in Greece: A Multiple Methods Perspective


Book Description

The overarching aim of this edited volume is to investigate different modes, patterns and determinants of youth political participation in Greece, since the economic crisis, by incorporating a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods. The chapters examine different forms of youth political participation, from institutionalized (such as voting, or membership in political parties) to non-institutionalized (such as signing petitions, protesting through demonstrations or occupations, and political consumerism). Moreover, the chapters shed light on diverse aspects of youth political participation, such as the interlinkages between occupational precarity and political behaviour, the spatial portrait of youth political engagement in rural, suburban and urban Greek contexts, the engendered aspects of political involvement, the pivotal role of protest events in youth political socialization and in mobilization in contentious political actions, the different impacts of priming inequality on youth’s political beliefs, depending on different modes of thinking, as well as the key features of youth-related and youth-led (non-state) organisations operating in Greece. The aforementioned aspects are examined at the micro, meso or/and macro level through distinct methodological approaches including panel survey, experimental survey, biographical interviews, in-depth interviews and action organization analysis, carried out in the context of the EURYKA (European Commission) project.




Understanding Youth Participation Across Europe


Book Description

This edited volume presents findings from a major cross-European research project mapping the civic and political engagement of young Europeans in the context of both shared and diverse political heritages. Drawing on new survey, interview and ethnographic data, the authors discuss substantive issues relating to young people’s attitudes and activism including: attitudes to the European Union and to history; understanding of political ideologies; how attitudes to democracy are shaped by political heritage; activism in radical right wing groups and religion-based organisations; and digital activism. These contributions make the book’s case that transnational and multi-method projects can enrich our understanding of how young people envisage their place and role in Europe’s political and civic space. The book challenges methodological assumptions that survey research shows the big picture but at the cost of local nuance or that qualitative research cannot speak beyond the individual case, and demonstrates the added explanatory value of triangulating different kinds of data. Understanding Youth Participation Across Europe will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including Sociology, Political Sociology, Youth Studies and Political and Civic Participation.




Youthquake 2017


Book Description

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book investigates the reasons behind the 2017 youthquake – which saw the highest rate of youth turnout in a quarter of a century, and an unprecedented gap in youth support for Labour over the Conservative Party – from both a comparative and a theoretical perspective. It compares youth turnout and party allegiance over time and traces changes in youth political participation in the UK since the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis – from austerity, to the 2016 EU referendum, to the rise of Corbyn – up until the June 2017 General Election. The book identifies the rise of cosmopolitan values and left-leaning attitudes amongst Young Millennials, particularly students and young women. The situation in the UK is also contrasted with developments in youth participation in other established democracies, including the youthquakes inspired by Obama in the US (2008) and Trudeau in Canada (2015).







Young People and Politics in the UK


Book Description

This book examines how young people understand and live politics, using innovative research methods. It treats age, class, gender and ethnicity as political 'lived experiences'. It concludes that young people are alienated, rather than apathetic, and that their interests and concerns are rarely addressed within mainstream political institutions.




Youth Participation in Democratic Life


Book Description

This book is concerned with the contexts, nature and quality of the participation of young people in European democratic life. The authors understand democracy broadly as both institutional politics and civic cultures, and a wide range of methods are used to analyse and assess youth participation and attitudes.




Children of the Dictatorship


Book Description

Putting Greece back on the cultural and political map of the “Long 1960s,” this book traces the dissent and activism of anti-regime students during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). It explores the cultural as well as ideological protest of Greek student activists, illustrating how these “children of the dictatorship” managed to re-appropriate indigenous folk tradition for their “progressive” purposes and how their transnational exchange molded a particular local protest culture. It examines how the students’ social and political practices became a major source of pressure on the Colonels’ regime, finding its apogee in the three day Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 which laid the foundations for a total reshaping of Greek political culture in the following decades.




Lowering the Voting Age to 16


Book Description

This book explores the consequences of lowering the voting age to 16 from a global perspective, bringing together empirical research from countries where at least some 16-year-olds are able to vote. With the aim to show what really happens when younger people can take part in elections, the authors engage with the key debates on earlier enfranchisement and examine the lead-up to and impact of changes to the voting age in countries across the globe. The book provides the most comprehensive synthesis on this topic, including detailed case studies and broad comparative analyses. It summarizes what can be said about youth political participation and attitudes, and highlights where further research is needed. The findings will be of great interest to researchers working in youth political socialization and engagement, as well as to policymakers, youth workers and activists.




Political Participation in the Digital Age


Book Description

This book explores the potential of the Internet for enabling new and flexible political participation modes. It meticulously illustrates how the Internet is responsible for citizens' participation practices from being general, high-threshold, temporally constricted, and dependent on physical presence to being topic-centered, low-threshold, temporally discontinuous, and independent from physical presence. With its ethnographic focus on Icelandic and German online participation tools Betri Reykjavík and LiquidFriesland, the book offers plentiful advice for citizens, programmers, politicians, and administrations alike on how to get the most out of online participation formats.




Street Citizens


Book Description

Explains the character of contemporary protest politics through a micro-mobilization analysis of participation in street demonstrations.