Mobilised yet Unaffiliated: Italian Youth and the Uneven Return to Political Participation

Young people have long been considered the most politically apathetic section of the population. Yet, recent elections in the United States and Europe seem to point to a reversal of this trend. To explore this issue, we analyse a survey on youth and political participation in Italy conducted in 2018. Comparing the results with a similar 2004 survey, we find strong evidence of a growth of political participation by young people. Following our model of intensities of participation (low/medium/high), we find that political participation has been growing at the level of low-intensity (voting, consuming news, discussing politics in small circles) and medium-intensity activities (contact and interaction with politicians and political self-expression), also thanks to social media use. With high-intensity activities (campaigning and organisation) the picture is more contradictory. While there has been some growth in attendance to protest events and other non-institutional activities, organisational membership is declining. We argue that this contradiction between high mobilisation and low organisational affiliation cannot be explained simply as stemming from generational suspicion of institutional politics, but that it reflects a problem of supply, the inability of organisations to successfully integrate young people and overcome their distrust of the political class.