Established democracies are confronted with low turnout-levels among young citizens. Since age-related inequality in political participation has increased in the last decades, political measures to counter the phenomenon are of central interest. Young voters’ reluctance to vote in national elections has been explained by their underprivileged social position. Young citizens are less likely to vote because of life-cycle effects and generation specific peculiarities. Crucial in this respect is the availability of resources. In reason of their position in the life-cycle, young citizens lack in resources empowering them to participate in politics. Further, due to a delayed transition to adulthood and insecurity on the labour market, resources play an increasingly relevant role in the political participation of young citizens. However, there is huge unexplained cross-country variation in young citizens’ turnout, ranging between 18% in Switzerland and 81% in Sweden. This suggests that there are significant differences in the extent to which age affects participation. This steers the attention towards the contextual factors affecting young citizens’ political behaviour. The paper will assess to what extent participation is affected by welfare provisions, labour market regulations and the characteristics of the educational system. We hypothesize, for instance, that these context factors are crucial in transferring resources (e.g. monetary resources, civic and political skills) to young citizens. Thus favourable welfare, labour and educational contexts will increase the likelihood of political participation among young citizens. We operationalize these hypotheses by means of multilevel analysis and cross-level interactions. The analysis will be based the surveys conducted by the European Social Survey (ESS), because it offers the opportunity to investigate young citizens’ participation among countries as well as over time.
