From Me to All of You: Young Danes, Privilege and Participation

Young people’s political participation is often associated with a generational opposition to societal norms and power structures based on the general idea of the ‘youth rebellion’ of the 60’s (Bjurström 1997). Driven by this, the present generation of young people is often portrayed as unengaged, disinterested and unprepared for democratic citizenship (Loncle et al, 2012). This deficit perspective has been counteracted by recent research, which demonstrates that young people are often not uninvolved, but they use forms and means other than formal participation to engage in society and to influence politics (Quintelier, 2007; Pohl et al, 2019, Bruselius-Jensen et al. 2021). In a Nordic context, research has furthermore identified young people’s forms of engagement as quiet and strategical (Lieberkin 2021).
This presentation is based on interviews with 86 young Danes engaged in twenty different organizations representing a broad selection, ranging from youth parties, NGO’s to activist groups and covering diverse aims such as development aid, climate, animal welfare, special needs, sexuality, religious believes and education.
Based on a triangulation that conceptualize engagement as a balance between a practical, a political and a personal dimension, the study, much in line with Lieberkin, identifies the idea of having privilege and feeling obliged to use this privilege to make positive changes for other young people to be the main driver for young Danes engagement in political and voluntary organizations. These findings constitute the starting point for a discussion of the need to develop new and more adequate concepts to grasp new forms of youth political engagement.