While the causes of lower participation may be multiple, a universal factor is the radically changed media environment for those who reached maturity in the years of the Internet, relative to previous generations. This is not a matter of technological fixes like e-voting, whose effect so far is marginal, but of something more profound. For previous generations, policies such as state support for newspapers and public service radio and television boosted political participation in the high civic literacy countries. But we do not dispose of parallel measures that could have a similar effect on the Internet generation.
Just what can we expect from this generation? This is the question I pose here, inspired by a widespread and longlasting student strike in Quebec in 2012. My contention is that there is an incompatibility between “social media politics” as understood and experienced by the Internet generation and representative democracy as we have known it.
