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Abstract
Political Participation of Youth Below Voting Age
Political participation of youth represents a possible approach for
more strongly incorporating the interests of youth in political
decisions and thus for counteracting the marginalization of this
group of the population. In order to study the relevance of political
participation of youth below voting age in different countries an
international research project coordinated by the European Centre was
conducted. This publication summarises the results of this project,
which was financed by the European Commission and the Austrian
Federal Ministry for Environment, Youth and Family Affairs.
The first chapter provides a short overview of the developments on an
international level. Here particular reference is made to the
importance of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as well as
to relevant opinions of the Council of Europe and the European
Parliament. Subsequent chapters go on to describe and analyse the
current developments in Austria, Finland, Italy, Sweden, and the
United Kingdom. The heterogeneity of the five national reports
suggests that we are concerned here with an extremely new field of
research that will hardly be able to rely on established definitions
and existing preliminary studies. In any case, the analyses clearly
reveal that forms of political participation of youth below voting
age do exist in all of the countries included in this study, although
in terms of conditions and extent there is relatively considerable
variation. In the final chapter a typology of the political
participation of youth shall be developed based on the national
reports and the results of a conference of experts with
representatives from 13 countries. The objective of drawing up this
typology was to systematise the experiences gleaned up until this
point and to create a firmer basis for future theoretical work on the
political participation of youth below voting age.Owner: Barbara Riepl and Helmut Wintersberger