Young people’s experiences of political membership: from political parties to Facebook groups

ABSTRACT

In contemporary democracies, citizens’ political memberships are undergoing significant changes. Particularly young people are described as being less interested in long-term commitments in conventional political collectives, instead preferring to engage in cause-oriented activism in loosely organised groups, often sustained by online media. However, behind these general trends, there is a diversity of collective activities, where people are typically part of several ones. The shifting forms of memberships have rarely been investigated as such from the perspective of young citizens. Using a qualitative multi-method approach, this article investigates how young people with an interest in civic and political issues experience and reflect upon their involvements in various collectives. The analysis focuses on two aspects: the explorations that characterise the participants’ political memberships, and the meanings and motives of joining political collectives. On the whole, the participants’ involvement can be described as shifting and tentative. This can be related to the idea of adolescence as a formative period of life, where explorations of memberships constitute important processes in young people’s development of values, beliefs and identities. As for meanings and motives, three themes were found to be central: perceived efficacy, self-identity and peer relationships. The study suggests that political membership is multidimensional and usefully analysed as a process rather than a dichotomous category. As such, it involves explorations and changes over time. The study highlights the reflexive dimensions of membership, where affiliations to collectives is something that youth try out, work on, account for and reconsider in relation to their self-identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Young people
• political membership
• social media
• activism
• political parties
• commitment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Mats Ekström is Professor, Department of Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Gothenburg. His research focuses on media discourse, conversation in institutional settings, political communication and young people’s political engagement. Recent publications include ‘Social media, porous boundaries and the development of online political engagement among young citizens’ (with Adam Shehata, in New Media and Society, 2016) and Young people’s political talk (in Journal of Youth Studies, 2016) [email: [email protected]].

Malin Sveningsson is an associate professor in Communication Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Publications include Creating a Sense of Community. Experiences from a Swedish Web Chat (2001), she is a co-author of Digital Borderlands: Cultural Studies of Identity and Interactivity on the Internet (2002), Cyberfeminism in Northern lights (2007), and Gender and sexuality in online game cultures (2012). Research interests include digital media, gender, identity, youth and political participation [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 The uneven gender distribution reflects the fact that more girls were willing to participate.

2 The Centre Party is a liberal and agrarian party, describing itself as green and social-liberal.

3 A concept from Simmel, reintroduced by Chayko (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research council [421-2010-1522].