In the literature on youth civic engagement, three implicit assumptions seem to be pervasive: that youth civic engagement is monolithic, manifest, and stable. The current study aimed to revisit and challenge these assumptions by investigating the alternative possibilities: diversity, latency, and change. For this purpose, using a three-wave longitudinal sample of about 500 Swedish adolescents (Mage=16), we explored (1) the diversity of youth political engagement when including a latent aspect of engagement (political interest), (2) whether the groups identified when taking into account the latent aspect differ from one another on citizenship competencies, and (3) the pattern of over-time changes in their political orientation. The results of analyses showed that (1) youth are diverse and form four distinct subgroups, (2) latent aspect of youth engagement (political interest) was valuable in identifying an important subgroup of youth who are “seemingly passive” but exhibit characteristics placing them closer to the active than passive group, and that (3) around half of the youth changed their orientations of civic engagement over time. Altogether, these results indicate that the currently held assumptions about youth engagement need to be revised.
