Political Engagement, Awareness and Identity among Younger Students

Civic engagement is an important approach to the study of how people perceive their role in democracy. The civic engagement literature discusses the process of becoming an active citizen, contrary to the voting behavior literature´s focus on voting and characteristics of voters and non-voters. However, we know little about how political and institutional frameworks shape political identity, or how political development dynamics evolve. And we know little about the specific relationship between democratic engagement and political attitudes. Political learning in various contexts, such as education, family, institutions and communities, plays a key role for the development of attitudes and participation in democratic processes. However, analyses show that especially young people in Western countries are dis-engaged and increasingly abandoning the idea of representative democracy in favour of strong leaders (Foa & Mounk, 2017). Contrary, other scholars interpret the situation in a less radical way, seeing it rather as a shift from traditional participation to more local and lifeworld-based engagement (Marsh et al., 2007). Consequently, there are both theoretical and empirical reasons to explore political identity development in order to understand fundamental challenges for consolidated democracies. This paper studies youth participation through the lens of political identity. A sample of Danish upper secondary school students is analyzed according to the paper´s theoretical assumptions.