This article argues that the current literature on political participation has treated political participation as a dichotomous variable, not recognising the many different ways citizens can participate politically. As a result we do not know much about what makes young people participate, and in particular what makes them participate in different ways. This article addresses this gap in our knowledge by exploring the similarities and differences between young people politically active in different institutional settings, more specifically those who have attended a meeting of a UK political party’s youth faction, a British Youth Council meeting or the 2010 NUS student demonstrations in London. The data was collected using an innovative survey methodology and analysed using multinomial regression analysis. The results show three main findings; the political party activists have very low self-efficacy, the demonstrators very high and the BYC activists are satisfied with the political system but not with politicians.
