engleski

Political Interest of Young People in South East Europe: A Cross-National Study

This presentation examines the formation of young people’s political interest ; specifically it aims to detect the measure in which political culture on one hand and political socialization on the other hand determine the emergence of youth's interest in politics across ten countries of South East Europe. There are many reasons for young people’s declared lack of interest in politics. However, youth researchers often find that their political (dis)interest can be a product of a specific political culture where political institutions are disinterested in young people’s concerns, which provokes distancing of young people from politics in general. Also, political interest is viewed partly as a result of individual democratic and participative political socialization. These two sets of determinants, along with sociodemographic attributes, are used as independent variables in the multiple regression analysis in which general youth’s interest in politics is a dependent variable. Perceived political culture factor consists of young people’s political trust, their external efficacy and expressed need for greater presence of youth in politics. It is expected that youth’s perception of their society’s political culture is positively related to the level of their political interest. The results show that this set of variables has a limited contribution to variation of youth’s political interest across all SEE countries. Political socialization factor consists of youth’s self-assessment of political knowledge, the level of importance they attribute to political and civic participation and frequency of political discussions with close people. The results show that political socialization variables represent better predictors of political interest in all SEE countries. Socio-demographic variables generally have little or no statistically significant relation to political interest. Overall, external factors in terms of political trustworthiness and youth’s perception of political relation towards young people play a minor role with regard to individual political socialization in development of general political interest.

youth, political interest, Southeast Europe, political culture, political socialization

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