A disillusioned generation? Young people and Political Participation: an inquiry into the French case

In the 2017 French Presidential Election, the lack of electoral participation of young people has been highlighted as almost 30% of young people between 18 and 30 years old did not vote during the first round (IPSOS, 2017). On the surface, it would appear that young people are less interested in politics, democratic processes, and issues of citizenship than older generations (Muxel 2001). However, findings indicate that young people are indeed engaging politically but through non-conventional forms of participation, for instance in social and protest movement such as #MeToo; the Yellow Vest; or Youth for climate (Pickard 2019, Tucker, 2019). It has been argued that the lack of electoral participation of young people may actually be due to the feeling of being underrepresented and excluded from the decision-making processes, as well as to a general dissatisfaction with the electoral system (Weiss, 2020). This conference paper investigates why young people participate less in elections and what their political behaviour tells us about the state of democracy. To do so, I investigate the case of France as a specific “advanced democracy”, where for young people political participation is not stable anymore (Kitanova, 2020). The main hypotheses of this research is that beyond the rise of a “democracy of the abstention” (Muxel, 2008), we are in fact in front of a disillusioned generation, well informed about politics but reluctant to participate in a system that does not represent them (Harris, Win, Younes 2010, Tiberj, 2017). I argue that the issue of political participation must be examined in context, considering young people’s individual level characteristics as well as contextual factors, such as their socio-spatial and socio-demographic environments. Taking different contexts into account (Przeworski and Soares 1971) allows us to examine how spatial and social inequalities may affect young people’s willingness to engage politically, including their voting behaviour. Through the mixed-methods technique - a survey that was conducted in France in December 2019 on 1954 young people between 18 and 30 years old, and 40 semi-structured interviews with young people in the Gironde area (South-West of France) - we aim to examine the reasons of the decreasing political participation of young people in France. In my analyses I used dependant variables such as voter turnout, interest for politics, activism scale, and the different forms of political participation. The independent variables are essentially socio-demographic (gender, education, current occupational status) and geographic. In order to take into account the geographical context, the survey and the interviews have been conducted in four different types of territories: Big cities, Suburbs, periurban areas and rural areas of France.