De groei van jongeren naar democratisch burgerschap en de verschillen naar onderwijstype

Abstract

Political participation is a form of civic involvement that is expected of every adult citizen and that is important for the legitimacy of the democratic system. However, it is assumed that all groups in society participate equally. In this regard, the scientific literature on democratic citizenship shows a growing concern about an alleged decline of political participation among youth. Young people are - when compared to previous generations - believed to be less involved in the public sphere. Many diagnoses of current youth do however suffer from selective perception: phenomena that are interpreted as being typical of the young, turn out, on closer inspection, to reflect general trends characteristic of the whole population. Moreover, recent research among Flemish youth has shown that young people - as they approach the voting age - gradually develop a greater degree of political involvement, which by the age of 20-22 is equal to that of the overall adult population. In this contribution, we have three goals: (1) to verify whether the latter finding can be replicated on the basis of new research material, (2) to map the evolution of political involvement between the ages of 14 and 30, and (3) to identify the inequalities that occur in this process, especially among young people from different educational tracks (special attention goes out to the comparison of students in general education with students in vocational education). The replication is based on a purely random sample of 3248 respondents, aged 14 to 30, living in the Flemish region of Belgium.