They (don’t) really care about us: Political parties and youth political participation.

An important, albeit relatively unexplored, dimension of parties’ organizational structures pertains to youth organizations. Political youth organizations are the “lifeblood of the parties” (Charalambous & Christophorou, 2015: 167) as they ensure both the renewal of the membership base and the vitality of the party message and ideology. However, their role is curtailed by the fact that youth electoral participation is spiralling down, with youngest citizens displaying lower levels of interest and (formal) commitment to party organizations (Van Biezen, Mair, & Poguntke 2012). These traits have echoed the signs of a politically uninterested and disengaged generation, raising concerns over its’ short- and long-term effects. As to the former, age differences in participation tend to create a vicious cycle of inequalities, since “unequal participation spells unequal influence” to quote the influential work of Lijphart (1997). As to the latter, lower levels of participation raise concerns about the long-term health of representative democracies (Wattenberg, 2003; Sloam & Henn, 2019). While youth organizations may be dubbed ‘incubators’ of political and party life, research has devoted scarce attention to the inner processes that allow such organizations to function as socializing agents for partisanship and organizational learning processes (Hooghe et al. 2004). Within this backdrop, we are interested in assessing two interrelated dimensions of youth participation from the parties’ perspectives. First, we seek to identify which youth mobilization strategies are more successful. Here, we are interested in a broad range of strategies to attract the youngest cohort – from political recruitment (including them in their ranks) to shaping campaigning strategies and policy preferences gearing them towards politically relevant issues that concern youth citizenship. Second, while examining the functions, aims and the strategies of youth party organizations, we are also interested in analysing how they interact with other partisan dimensions and civil society organisations. Specifically, attention will be devoted to the manner in which youth sections can or do act as either as an internalised interest group – mobilising young voters towards the goals of the broader party organisation – or as a more disruptive and challenging voice in relation to the national leadership. These goals will be empirically delved into through a set of party elite interviews with former and current youth organisations leaders (both considering their national structures, and a geographically representative sample of subnational structures). Empirically, we focus on the Portuguese case, a ‘typical case’ (Gerring, 2008), of youth electoral participation spiralling down, lower levels of youth interest and (formal) commitment to party organizations and low levels of political literacy.